One thing about being successful is that I stopped being afraid of dying. Once you’re a star you’re dead already. You’re embalmed.

Hoffman frames celebrity as a kind of living death: once the public fixes you as “a star,” your image becomes static, preserved, and handled by others. The metaphor of being “embalmed” suggests that fame can arrest personal growth, reducing a complex, changing person to a marketable persona and a set of expectations. In that sense, success can lessen fear of literal death because the star’s identity has already been symbolically “killed” and curated—what survives is an artifact. The quote also implies a critique of the entertainment industry’s tendency to commodify people, turning them into objects for consumption rather than private individuals with ordinary vulnerability.