Celebrity
Dustin Hoffman, 89, Recalls Being Held at Gunpoint by Married Lover’s Husband as Memoir Drops
Dustin Hoffman is saying a little-known story that sounds like something out of The Graduate.
The 89-year-old actor skyrocketed to fame in 1967 when he played the aimless college grad, Benjamin Braddock, who has a now-iconic affair with the much older Mrs. Robinson (played by Anne Bancroft). As it turns out, this scenario wasn’t exactly far from Hoffman’s real life.
During a recent appearance on Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend in support of his new memoir Look at Me, he shared a story from his younger years that has a definite Mrs. Robinson vibe.
Hoffman told Conan O’Brien, “This is in my youth, youth. I was having an affair with a married woman. And she thought that once her husband went to sleep, that he stayed asleep. And I was invited to come over after he went to sleep.”
Unlike The Graduate, it wasn’t the woman’s daughter who caught Hoffman and his “friend” in the act. Instead, it was her husband.
He continued, “And there we are having a festival of sorts. And he walked in with a gun. And he pointed it at me. And he said, I remember what he said, ‘Get out. Get out.'”
Hoffman explained what staring down the barrel of a gun was like. Decades after the incident, he can still recall, “And when you have a gun pointed at you, first of all, that hole is much bigger than the actual hole, and you realize how any second, any second he’s going to pull that trigger, because his finger is on the trigger. And you think any second he’s going to. You realize it’s it, it’s it. It’s it. I’m going to die. I’m going to die in the next second, the next second, the next second. And you’d do anything. You will do anything. You know, to avoid.”
Luckily for Hoffman and his fans, the husband didn’t pull the trigger. While he doesn’t say what happened next, we can assume he complied with the man’s demand to “get out.” His new memoir, Look at Me, dropped on November 10. According to publisher Simon & Schuster, the book (which was co-authored by Ariel Levy) is “an intimate memoir about art, ambition, family, friendship, love, aging, and the mysteries of a creative life.”
