Dustin Hoffman says filming The Graduate was ‘a terrible experience’ because of Mike Nichols’ ‘sadism’ | Dustin Hoffman

Nearly 60 years after the release of The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman has revealed that making the 1967 film that launched his career was “a terrible experience” and that he felt “immediately uncomfortable, unworthy” as a Jewish actor playing “the ultimate Wasp”, Ben Braddock.

In an essay for the New Yorker, taken from his upcoming memoir Look at Me, co-written with New Yorker editor Ariel Levy, the 89-year-old actor wrote: “The Graduate exacerbated all my insecurities from the start.

“There I was, playing the lead in a movie by Mike Nichols, who was the director of THE moment, but I felt like I had no right to be there. I didn’t even want to try out for the role.

Hoffman was a successful stage actor when Nichols expressed interest in him. The director had spent two years casting the leads, rubbing shoulders with actors such as Robert Redford before hiring Hoffman as Ben and Katharine Ross as Elaine Robinson.

Hoffman remembers sitting for hours doing his hair and makeup while Nichols gave makeup artists instructions to change his appearance, including removing his unibrow and commenting on the shape of his nose.

“I remember thinking, They’re trying to rid me of the Jew, and that’s not going to happen. All I wanted was to go home to ethnic New York where I belonged. I knew I wasn’t a leading man. I knew my place,” he wrote.

Hoffman said Nichols was “a totally different person” when it came to making the film after weeks of rehearsals: he was difficult to read, his mood was changeable, and he was “often sour.”

“Mike was irritable with everyone, but with me a certain sadism seemed to set in,” Hoffman wrote, revealing that he was slapped 27 times by Ross for a scene that didn’t even make the final cut. “He made us do 27 takes,” Hoffman wrote.

“In the scene, Benjamin runs into Elaine’s room, drenched in the rain, to tell her that he had an affair with an older woman; within seconds, Elaine realizes that this woman is his mother. Mike kept telling Katharine to hit me, to hit me harder.

“Katharine was afraid she would hurt me and I told her, ‘I’m fine. Don’t hit my ear.’ Unfortunately, she missed several times. I was dizzy by the end of the day and Mike didn’t even use the slap in the movie.

The next day, Hoffman punctured his eardrum while filming an underwater scene where he wore a diving suit in a swimming pool.

“When I came up for air after a few takes, blood was coming out of my ear. Between all the slaps the day before and all the pressure of the water at the bottom of the pool, I had burst my eardrum,” he wrote.

Hoffman shared that his co-star Anne Bancroft, who played his older lover, Mrs. Robinson, fainted during a scene on a hot day and “she had to be revived with oxygen.” Hoffman himself was forced to rehearse a scene in which he ran from his car to the church to declare his love for Elaine until he thought he would faint.

“We did it again and again, until I was completely destroyed by exhaustion and dehydration. I remember lying down on the grass in front of the church because I thought I was going to pass out,” he wrote.

Making The Graduate, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won best director at the 40th Academy Awards, turned out to be “a terrible experience” for a film that “changed my life”, he said.

“All this time, I felt like Mike was angry with me, either because I was doing something wrong or because he had realized what everyone else already knew, which was that he had miscast the lead role in his movie.”

Hoffman felt that six decades later, the film was something of a “self-portrait” for director Nichols, who came to the United States from Germany in 1939 as a young Jewish boy.

“He was looking for an alter ego – that’s why it took Benjamin years to cast, and maybe that’s why he was so hard on me. I was a stand-in, there to absorb Mike’s disgust.”

Hoffman’s memoir, Look at Me, will be released on November 10.