{"id":950185,"date":"2026-11-02T19:16:11","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T19:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/950185\/"},"modified":"2026-11-02T19:16:11","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T19:16:11","slug":"dustin-hoffman-pens-essay-about-terrible-experience-making-the-graduate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/950185\/","title":{"rendered":"Dustin Hoffman pens essay about “terrible experience” making The Graduate"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Graduate may have been the project that made Dustin Hoffman a household name, but according to him, filming it was a \u201cterrible experience.\u201d This is per a new essay that Hoffman penned and The New Yorker published<\/a> this weekend, which mostly focused on Hoffman\u2019s occasionally tense relationship with director Mike Nichols. \u201cMike was so wonderful during rehearsal that it was shocking, destabilizing, when we started shooting the film and he was an entirely different person,\u201d writes Hoffman. \u201cI often felt that I was about to be fired. When we were shooting some of the film\u2019s most famous sequences, I remember thinking, I have no fucking idea what I\u2019m doing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Though there are plenty of compliments to go around, too\u2014The Graduate, of course, is frequently cited among the best films ever made\u2014the negative parts of the experience seem to be hard for Hoffman to forget. \u201cMike was irritable with everyone, but with me a certain sadism seemed to creep in. There was a scene in which Katharine Ross had to slap me, and he made us do twenty-seven takes,\u201d the actor writes. \u201cI was dizzy by the end of that day, and Mike didn\u2019t even use the slap in the film.\u201d Hoffman also recalls puncturing an eardrum during a scene where he had to wear a wetsuit in the pool, and nearly losing consciousness while filming the scene where his character Benjamin runs to the church at the end of the movie. \u201cIt was a terrible experience making the movie that changed my life. The whole time, I felt Mike was angry at me, either because I was doing something wrong or because he had realized what everybody else already knew, that he had miscast the lead in his film,\u201d writes Hoffman. (We would be remiss not to mention that Hoffman has faced several allegations of sexually predatory<\/a> or otherwise unprofessional\u2014including slapping Meryl Streep on the set of Kramer Vs. Kramer<\/a>\u2014behavior on various sets over the years.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, Hoffman has come to understand Nichols differently in the years since filming wrapped. Hoffman has come to understand that he was there to serve as Nichols\u2019 own stand-in in the film. He writes:<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t notice for years that, not long after his professional breakup with Elaine May\u2014his partner in crime, his artistic collaborator since college\u2014he made a movie in which the hero bangs against the glass wall of a church screaming, in anguish, \u2018Elaine! Elaine! Elaine!\u2019 He was looking for an alter ego\u2014that\u2019s why Benjamin had taken years to cast, and maybe that\u2019s why he was so hard on me. I was a stand-in, there to absorb Mike\u2019s own self-loathing.<\/p>\n

You can read the whole essay in The New Yorker<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Graduate may have been the project that made Dustin Hoffman a household name, but according to him,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":950186,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-950185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=950185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/950186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=950185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=950185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=950185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}