Nearly 60 years after The Graduate was released, Dustin Hoffman has described making the 1967 film as “a terrible experience”. In an essay for The New Yorker drawn from his upcoming memoir, Look at Me, the actor says he felt “immediately uncomfortable, unworthy” playing Ben Braddock, a character he called “the ultimate Wasp”.
Hoffman writes that he doubted he belonged in a starring role directed by Mike Nichols and initially did not want to audition. A successful theatre actor at the time, he recalls spending hours in hair and makeup while Nichols instructed artists to alter his appearance, including removing his monobrow. Hoffman says he felt they were trying to “take the Jew off my face”.
After weeks of rehearsals, Hoffman found Nichols difficult to read and frequently sour on set. He writes that the director seemed to treat him with particular harshness. For a scene in which Ben tells Elaine Robinson, played by Katharine Ross, that he has had an affair with her mother, Nichols asked Ross to slap Hoffman repeatedly. Hoffman says the scene took 27 takes, left him dizzy and was ultimately not used in the film.
Hoffman says that the following day he punctured an eardrum while filming underwater in a swimming pool. He also recalls Anne Bancroft, who played Mrs Robinson, fainting during a scene on a hot day and being given oxygen. In another scene, he had to repeat a run from his car to a church until he was exhausted and dehydrated.
Although The Graduate changed his life, Hoffman says he spent much of the shoot worrying that Nichols was angry with him or believed he had been miscast. Looking back, he suggests the director may have seen Ben as a kind of alter ego, and that Hoffman was made to absorb Nichols’s own self-loathing.
Hoffman’s memoir, Look at Me, co-written with New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy, is due to be published on 10 November. The film received seven Oscar nominations and won best director at the 40th Academy Awards.
Sources: The Guardian Film.