Patrick Fugit Says Acting with Philip Seymour Hoffman ‘Made Me Much Better’ (Exclusive)

Patrick Fugit remembers his time acting with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous fondly.

When Fugit, 42, sat down with PEOPLE to discuss the 2000 rock ‘n’ roll movie for its 25th anniversary, he said meeting Hoffman, who played real-life music journalist and critic Lester Bangs in the film, gave new light to scenes featuring their characters.

“Once I met Philip Seymour Hoffman, I was really into those scenes. They took on a gravity that I hadn’t expected,” Fugit says. “The Lester Bangs, William Miller scenes had a much deeper meaning and effect on how I understood William from when we were rehearsing.”

Fugit earned his first screen acting credit in Almost Famous, in which he portrays a teenage music journalist who goes on tour with the fictional rock band Stillwater after Rolling Stone contracts him to write a long-form piece on the band.

“I got to rehearse a ton with Kate [Hudson] and Billy [Crudup] and Frances [McDormand],” Fugit says. “Phillip, I didn’t even meet until we were filming, and then we filmed a couple scenes in San Diego.”

“Just the way that Philip was playing Lester Bangs and his process and his professionalism and his intensity was all really interesting to me and made me made me much better in those scenes.”

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“The way he was engaging with me was so organic and had so much depth to it that it just required a lot to come out of me,” the actor adds of filming with Hoffman, who died in February 2014 at 46. “It just sort of resulted in much better work.”

Almost Famous depicts a teen’s coming-of-age in 1973, when classic rock dominated the airwaves. The movie also marked Fugit’s own coming-of-age on the big screen, and he has since racked up more than 30 acting credits in his career, including roles in movies like Saved!, We Bought a Zoo, Gone Girl and First Man.  

“I watch it and I see a lot of how green I was, in a way,” Fugit says of rewatching Almost Famous, which he admits he has not done since “a few years ago now.”

“There were a lot of times where I sort of just relied on my innate ability to perform. I had been performing for a long time at that point,” he says. “I grew up doing ballet from when I was, I don’t know, 7, until I was a teenager. My mom was a great ballet teacher, but when you’re 7 or 8 years old, you don’t really learn a lot of dancing for ballet, and I wasn’t a very good dancer. So I had learned a lot of tricks to performing, or if I didn’t really understand what William was going through, I would rely on a sort of intuition.”