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Dustin Hoffman says he had an “epiphany” about society’s judgmental nature while filming his 1982 hit film Tootsie.
In the movie, which earned Hoffman an Oscar nom, he pretends to be a woman to land a role in a soap opera.
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After getting his makeup done and shooting some scenes, Hoffman was watching footage of himself and found that he was “shocked that I wasn’t more attractive.” He asked the makeup team to make him “more beautiful.”
“And they said to me, ‘That’s as good as it gets,'” Hoffman recalls in a December AFI video interview, which has gone viral.
He says he started crying while relating the story to his wife.
“I said, ‘I have to make this picture,’ and she said, ‘Why?’,” Hoffman recalls. “And I said, ”Because I think I am an interesting woman when I look at myself on screen. And I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character because she doesn’t fulfill physically the demands that we’re brought up to think women have to have in order to ask them out.'”
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Hoffman gets emotional while retelling the story in the video.
“‘There’s too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed,'” Hoffman says he told his wife at the time. Of the film, he adds, “That was never a comedy for me.”
While the video was made more than six months ago, it only went viral Tuesday. On YouTube, the video has amassed more than 1.67 million views and nearly 6,300 likes.
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