NOT FOR ME!

Dustin Hoffman Reveals How Much He Hated Filming Iconic Movie

The Oscar-winning actor said the experience made him never want to “make another movie again for the rest of my life.”

Dustin Hoffman has said filming The Graduate was “a terrible experience” that “exacerbated” all his insecurities.

Hoffman was nominated for an Oscar Award for Best Actor for playing Benjamin Braddock in the 1967 classic, but he never felt he was right for the part. The movie follows aimless college graduate Benjamin as he navigates a bizarre love triangle between an older seductress and her daughter.

Hoffman, who later won two Best Actor Oscars for 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer and 1989’s Rain Man, wrote in his upcoming memoir Look At Me that much of his discomfort on set came from his relationship with director Mike Nichols.

Hoffman said that Nichols “was so wonderful during rehearsal that it was shocking, destabilizing, when we started shooting the film and he was an entirely different person.” Nichols became demanding, anxious, and irritable with everyone, but especially with Hoffman.

“With me a certain sadism seemed to creep in,” he wrote in his memoir, which The New Yorker excerpted. “There was a scene in which [co-star] Katharine Ross had to slap me, and he made us do twenty-seven takes.”

“Mike just kept telling Katharine to hit me, to hit me harder,” he continued. “Katharine worried she would hurt me, and I told her, ‘I’m OK. Just don’t hit my ear.’ Unfortunately, she missed a few times. I was dizzy by the end of that day, and Mike didn’t even use the slap in the film.”

During a pool scene where Benjamin is trying the scuba suit his father bought him, Nichols made Hoffman stay underwater the whole time.

“When I came up for air after a few takes, there was blood trickling out of my ear,” he said. “Between all the slapping during the previous day and all the water pressure at the bottom of the pool, I’d punctured an eardrum.”

Even though Nichols encouraged him to take the role, Hoffman constantly felt like Nichols regretted casting him, largely because he was Jewish and Benjamin was supposed to be a mega-WASP. Before Nichols even cast him, Hoffman said his Jewishness meant he wasn’t right for the part, but Nichols disagreed, saying of Benjamin, “Maybe he’s Jewish inside.”

But once filming began, it became clear that his Jewish ethnicity was, in fact, a problem. In a hair-and-makeup room, Mike asked whether people could “do something with his eyebrows.”

“Then Mike said that my neck looked too thick, so they put me in a turtleneck,” Hoffman wrote. “But he was still unhappy with what he was seeing. (I, too, was increasingly unhappy.) Mike sounded almost innocent when he asked... ‘Now, what are we going to do about the nose?’ I remember thinking, They’re trying to take the Jew off my face, and it ain’t going to happen.”

Hoffman explained that filming The Graduate made him never want to “make another movie again for the rest of my life,” he wrote. He also said that Nichols had told Hoffman’s friend, theater director Ulu Grosbard, that he regretted hiring Hoffman. According to Hoffman, Nichols “was looking for an alter ego” to play Benjamin.

“That’s why Benjamin had taken years to cast, and maybe that’s why he was so hard on me,” Hoffman wrote. “I was a stand-in, there to absorb Mike’s own self-loathing.”

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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