Why Sam Rockwell Dedicated His Oscar Win To Philip Seymour Hoffman

Los Angeles-- After completing his domination of awards season by picking up the Oscar for best supporting actor in a film for "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri," Sam Rockwell ended his acceptance speech on an unexpected note.

After winning the top honor at the 90th annual Academy Awards March 4, Rockwell quickly dedicated his win to his "dear friend, Phil Hoffman" before exiting the stage. The reference was to Philip Seymour Hoffman, an Oscar-winning actor in his own right, who passed away after an overdose in 2014.

Shortly after, Rockwell explained the dedication while speaking to reporters in the press interview room at the Hollywood and Highland Center, admitting they have been close friends, and Hoffman was a huge inspiration for him.

"He was an old friend of mine, and he directed me in a play at the Public Theater, and, yeah, he was very close to me and he was an inspiration to all of my peers," he said. "...And he was a great director and he believed in doing theater. In fact, he was—he vowed to do a play a year, which I don't know if he got to do because he was very busy doing movies, but he was a great inspiration and a great theater director. And I don't know if anybody knows, he was a bit of a jock. He was a wrestler, and he played basketball, and he inspired me. And I could go on for an hour about Phil Hoffman. Philip Seymour Hoffman was a good friend and he was a huge, huge inspiration on me."

Rockwell also hit back at the criticism the film has received, admitting it dealt with a "complicated issue," before also admitting that had the characters in the film been in the real world, they would have been sent off to prison in the end.

"It's not like they are like all of a sudden redeemed at the end of the movie. They have, you know a lot of work to do and maybe some therapy, you know. It's an ongoing thing, you know," he said. "So, and it's also—it'd a movie and it's a dark fairytale of some sorts. And so it's like, it's not necessarily—in real life we probably would have gone to prison."