Dustin Hoffman ‘slapped 27 times’ during ‘terrible experience’ filming The Graduate - The Independent

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.

Dustin Hoffman has opened up on filming the classic 1967 film The Graduate, describing the production as a “terrible experience”.

The 89-year-old actor claimed that he was slapped on camera 27 times by co-star Katharine Ross, at the behest of director Mike Nichols.

Writing in his new autobiography Look at Me, in an extract published by The New Yorker, Hoffman recalled: “I felt immediately uncomfortable, unworthy. Here I was, playing a starring role in a movie by Mike Nichols, who was the director of the moment, but I felt like I had no right to be there.

“It was a terrible experience making the movie that changed my life.”

Nichols, who died in 2014, rose to fame as half of a comedy double-act with Elaine May, and had announced himself as a noteworthy film director the previous year with the acclaimed comedy-drama adaptation Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Hoffman said that his anxiety around working with Nichols came from the suspicion that he “was angry at me, either because I was doing something wrong or because he had realised what everybody else already knew, that he had miscast the lead in his film”.

In The Graduate, Hoffman plays Benjamin Braddock, a young college graduate and “WASP” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Hoffman, born to an Ashkenazi Jewish family of Russian and Romanian immigrants, was cast after a two-year process.

He wrote that the role in The Graduate “exacerbated all my insecurities from the start”.

“When my agent said that Mike was interested in me, I didn’t even want to try out for the part. I had read the Charles Webb novel that Mike was adapting, and it was obvious that I was all wrong for Benjamin,” he wrote.

“A track star and straight-A student, the head of the debate team – this was an affluent, all-American kid, whose surname was ‘Braddock’. Why would you cast a person who looks as ethnic as I do to play the ultimate Wasp? It made absolutely no sense.”

He criticised Nichols’s behaviour on set, claiming that the late filmmaker was “irritable with everyone” and displayed a “certain sadism” that “seemed to creep in” when dealing with him in particular.

“There was a scene in which Katharine Ross had to slap me, and he made us do 27 takes,” Hoffman claimed. “The scene has Benjamin run into Elaine’s room, soaking wet from the rain, to tell her that he’s had an affair with an older woman; within seconds, Elaine realizes the woman is her mother.

“Mike just kept telling Katharine to hit me, to hit me harder. Katharine worried she would hurt me, and I told her, ‘I’m O.K. 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.”

He also recalled shooting an underwater scene shortly after, which required the use of a scuba suit.

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

Hoffman’s autobiography is published on 10 November.

Widely regarded as one of the best actors of his generation, Hoffman went on to star in films such as Midnight Cowboy, All the President’s Men, Kramer vs Kramer, and Rain Man.