Overview
- Hoffman writes in an excerpt from his forthcoming autobiography that making The Graduate felt like "a terrible experience" and that the role intensified long-running insecurities about being miscast.
- He says director Mike Nichols was often irritable and that Nichols ordered co-star Katharine Ross to slap him 27 times during one scene, which left him dizzy and the takes unused.
- Hoffman reports that the next day he filmed an underwater scene and later found blood in his ear, which he says resulted in a punctured eardrum.
- The account appears in The New Yorker and is drawn from Hoffman’s memoir Look at Me, with reporting so far relaying his first-person recollections rather than new contemporaneous corroboration or responses from Nichols, who died in 2014.
- The Graduate remains a widely praised 1967 film that won Best Picture, and this memoir excerpt could prompt fresh discussion of the film’s legacy and how celebrated productions treated actors on set.