Dustin Hoffman recalls moment he thought he was 'gonna die' after being caught in bed with another man's wife
Dustin Hoffman has been looking back over his life in the run-up to the release of his memoir, Look at me, which was release this week.
Speaking on the Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend podcast on Monday 9th, the 89-year-old, whose filmography include Rain Man and Tootsie, explained that an affair with a married woman when he was a young man ended with her husband pointing a gun at him.
'I was having an affair with a maried woman,' Hoffman recalled. "She thought that once her husband went to sleep, that he stayed asleep."
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The actor said he has been invited over once the husband had gone to sleep.
"There we are... Having a festical of sorts and he walked in with a gun. He pointed at me and I remember he said, 'get out, get out.'"
Hoffman went on to describe what it felt like to have a weapon aimed at him.
"When you have a gun pointed at you, first of all, that hole is much bigger than the actual hole," he said.
"You realize how, any second, any second he's going to pull that trigger. His finger is on the trigget and you think any second he's going to.
"You realize, ‘That’s it, that’s it, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, the next second, the next second, the next second,’" he added.
"And you’d do anything, you will do anything, to avoid getting killed."
The conversation took a lighter turn from there. O’Brien, 63, who hosts the podcast, jokingly asked how the situation was resolved, and Hoffman said the ‘festival’ did not continue after the furious husband appeared.
"You jumped out the window? You ran away? Continued the festival?" the host joked. "Sir, could you come back in five minutes … I need five minutes. Make it seven minutes."
The discussion later moved on to another story from Hoffman's memoir. In an essay published by the New Yorker to promote the book, the two-time Oscar winner revealed that making The Graduate had been a 'terrible experience'.
The film follows Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate played by Hoffman, who is seduced by an older woman named Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) before falling in love with her daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross).
"It was a terrible experience making the movie that changed my life.
"The whole time, Ifelt Mike [Nichols] was angry at mem either because I was doing something wrong or because he had realized what everyone else already knew, that he had miscast the lead in his film," Hoffman wrote.
Hoffman earned his first Oscar nomination for the role at the 1968 Academy Awards, but lost out to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night.
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV
Thomas Bamford
