Dustin Hoffman says Katharine Ross slapped him in 27 takes on The Graduate, in new memoir Look at Me

Dustin Hoffman says Katharine Ross slapped him across 27 takes while filming The Graduate, on director Mike Nichols's orders, and the scene never even made the film. The story is in an essay for The New Yorker taken from Hoffman's memoir Look at Me, which comes out on 10 November 2026, as Parade reported via AOL.

The 27 slaps

• Nichols kept telling Ross to hit Hoffman harder, take after take, Hoffman writes.
• By the end of the day he was dizzy. The next day, while shooting in a scuba suit, blood came from his ear when he surfaced. He blames a punctured eardrum on the slaps combined with the water pressure.
• Nichols then cut the slap from the 1967 film altogether.

"A terrible experience"

Hoffman describes the shoot as hard going. He did not believe he could play Benjamin Braddock, a character he saw as an affluent, athletic Anglo-American unlike himself, and he feared Nichols thought he had made a casting mistake. Nichols was supportive in rehearsals but often sour once cameras rolled, and Hoffman says he felt close to being fired and struggled to work out what the director wanted. He also nearly collapsed while running again and again in the California heat for the sequence in which Benjamin races to stop Elaine's wedding.

Why it matters

The Graduate made Hoffman a star and became one of the defining American films of the 1960s; he went on to win two best actor Oscars, for Kramer vs Kramer and Rain Man. Accounts like this, of directors pushing actors physically to get a performance, have become a running conversation in Hollywood, and his memoir is likely to add to it.

When and where to read it

Look at Me is due on 10 November. The New Yorker essay is online now. If you are buying the book from abroad, our currency converter shows what the dollar price comes to in rupees. More from the film world on our entertainment desk.