Dustin Hoffman, who shot to fame starring as Ben Braddock in Mike Nichols’ classic film The Graduate, has opened up about shooting the 1967 comedy-drama in a recent essay for The New Yorker — calling it a “terrible experience” despite the fact that the movie changed his life.
Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (Credits: Variety)
Dustin Hoffman Felt Miscast in The Graduate
“I felt immediately uncomfortable, unworthy,” Hoffman writes. “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.”
Much of his anxiety came from worrying that Nichols “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.”
The insecurity is almost surreal to read about now. The Graduate made Hoffman an overnight star, earned Nichols the Best Director Oscar, and became one of the defining films of 1960s American cinema — a small, arty, uncomfortable movie that nearly unseated The Sound of Music and Gone With the Wind as the highest-grossing picture of all time.
The 27 Slaps That Never Made the Cut
The most startling detail in the essay is the ordeal Hoffman endured for a scene audiences never even saw. Director Mike Nichols made Katharine Ross slap him 27 times for a scene that he “didn’t even use”.
It’s the kind of anecdote that lands differently in 2026 than it would have in 1967 — a snapshot of an era when directors were given near-total latitude on set, and young actors felt they had no right to push back.
Hoffman arrived at the film as a long-struggling New York stage actor with almost no film work, and — in his own telling — spent the whole shoot convinced the role should have gone to someone else. The essay, titled “Surviving The Graduate,” reframes one of Hollywood’s most famous success stories as a survival story instead: the making of a legend, remembered as an ordeal.
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Source: Variety — read the full story there.
