Dustin Hoffman calls filming The Graduate 'a terrible experience'

Dustin Hoffman says making The Graduate was "a terrible experience" and that director Mike Nichols showed "a certain sadism" toward him on set. The 89-year-old actor makes the claims in an essay for the New Yorker, drawn from his upcoming memoir Look at Me, co-written with New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy and published on 10 November.

Almost 60 years after the 1967 film launched his career, Hoffman writes that he felt "immediately uncomfortable, unworthy" as a Jewish actor cast as "the ultimate Wasp", Ben Braddock.

"The Graduate exacerbated all my insecurities from the start," Hoffman wrote. "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. I didn't even want to try out for the part."

How the casting worked

Hoffman was a successful theatre actor when Nichols expressed interest in him. The director had spent two years casting the lead roles. He saw actors including Robert Redford before hiring Hoffman as Ben and Katharine Ross as Elaine Robinson.

Hoffman recalls sitting in hair and makeup for hours while Nichols instructed artists to alter his appearance, removing his monobrow and commenting on the shape of his nose.

"I remember thinking, They're trying to take the Jew off my face, and it ain't going to happen," Hoffman wrote. "All I wanted to do was go home, to ethnic New York, where I belonged. I knew I was no leading man. I knew my place."

What happened on set?

Hoffman said Nichols became "an entirely different person" once shooting began after weeks of rehearsals: difficult to read, changeable in mood and "frequently sour".

"Mike was irritable with everyone, but with me a certain sadism seemed to creep in," Hoffman wrote.

He reveals Ross slapped him 27 times for one scene that never made the final cut. The scene had Benjamin run into Elaine's room, soaking wet, to confess an affair with an older woman; Elaine realises the woman is her mother. "Mike just kept telling Katharine to hit me, to hit me harder," Hoffman wrote. "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."

The next day, Hoffman punctured an eardrum filming an underwater pool scene in a scuba suit. "When I came up for air after a few takes, there was blood trickling out of my ear," he wrote.

Anne Bancroft, who played Mrs Robinson, fainted during a scene on a hot day and "had to be resuscitated with oxygen". Hoffman himself repeated a scene running from his car to the church "over and over and over again, until I was absolutely trashed from exhaustion and dehydration". He remembers lying down in the grass outside the church because he thought he would lose consciousness.

Why was Nichols so hard on him?

"The whole time, I felt Mike 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," Hoffman wrote.

He reflects that the film was something of "a self-portrait" for Nichols, who came to the US from Germany in 1939 as a young Jewish boy. "He was looking for an alter ego — that's why Benjamin had taken years to cast, and maybe that's why he was so hard on me. I was a stand-in, there to absorb Mike's own self-loathing."

The Graduate was nominated for seven Oscars and won Nichols best director at the 40th Academy Awards. Hoffman's account, arriving nearly six decades on, reframes the making of a Hollywood landmark as a story of pain rather than triumph — and it guarantees the memoir will be read as much for its reckoning with Nichols as for Hoffman's own career.