BLOOD BROTHERS

Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson star in The Long Walk, a violent and harrowing Stephen King drama that's ultimately about the bond between two young men from very different backgrounds—a connection that's just as deep (but much more fun) off-screen.

- BY RAYMOND ANG

PREVIOUS PAGE, FROM LEFT ON JONSSON jacket and pants Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello vintage hoodie and vintage belt from The Society Archive shirt Factor's tie Thom Browne shoes S.S. Daley ON HOFFMAN jacket and pants Brunello Cucinelli shirt Auralee tie Valentino Garavani boots The Frye Company sunglasses Oakley

AT FIRST GLANCE, they have very little in common.

Cooper Hoffman is a born-and-bred New Yorker, the 22-year-old son of the late acting titan Philip Seymour Hoffman, who grew up around his parents' creative circle and, as a kid, made iPhone action sequences with Paul Thomas Anderson. For 31-year-old David Jonsson, art was a saving grace in his working-class immigrant east London household, where he was taught by his cinephile dad to revere classic films like Malcolm X and Waiting to Exhale but whose reality was a world away from Hollywood.

But if you hear them tell it, those differences dissolved instantly when they met—it sounds, in fact, a little like love at first sight.

This was on the chemistry read for The Long Walk, an upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s dystopian 1979 novel, going over scenes for Francis Lawrence, the director behind the blockbuster Hunger Games franchise. The success of the adaptation hinged on finding two actors who might initially seem starkly different but, later, telegraph a connection as intense as that between brothers.

“It was like I was on a first date,” Hoffman says, laughing. “I couldn’t stop smiling. I was like, ‘David, you might be the most charismatic person I've ever met in my life.’”

The boys spent a chunk of the read shooting the shit, talking about sports. “About the Knicks game the night before,” Jonsson explains. “And then we moved on to socc-.”