I never thought I’d get hired when I started out
DUSTIN HOFFMAN NEVER EXPECTED TO BE A SUPERSTAR, BUT AS HE APPEARS IN A NEW NETFLIX MOVIE ALONGSIDE ADAM SANDLER, HE IS JUST HAPPY HE IS STILL HAVING FUN. THE DUO TALK TO LAURA HARDING ABOUT FATHERHOOD, FAME AND FIGURING IT ALL OUT
DUSTIN HOFFMAN is quite surprised he’s here. Not here, here, seated next to Adam Sandler in a dark London hotel room, but here as a megastar and double Oscar winner, still working at the age of 80.
It’s 50 years since he descended that escalator to the sound of Simon & Garfunkel in The Graduate, propelling him to a kind of generation-defining fame he never could have predicted.
Since then the hits are almost too numerous to mention, although any attempt would surely include Midnight Cowboy, All The President’s Men, Kramer vs Kramer, Rain Man, Straw Dogs, Marathon Man, Tootsie and Hook.
“I never thought that I would get hired when I was starting out,” he says.
“Bob Duvall, Gene Hackman and myself, we were hoping just to make a living, off-off Broadway, off Broadway, we never thought any of this would happen.”
But happen it did, to all three of them, a band of pals who are now often mentioned in conversations about the greatest living actors.
Dustin has been nominated for seven Academy Awards and bagged two, for Kramer vs Kramer and Rain Man, won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute and the Kennedy Centre Honours Award, but says all that success has not helped him to put his finger on quite who he is.
“I calculated that I need to live to be about 132, because at that moment I will know myself,” he says.
“I have been talking to God about that.”
He is certainly settling into the professional role of a patriarch, and flexing some of his comedic muscles in films such as Meet The Fockers, Little Fockers and the Kung Fu Panda animated movies.
He continues that run in Noah Baumbach’s new film The Meyerowtiz Stories (New And Selected), the story of an estranged family who are brought together in New York for an event celebrating the work of their artist father, Harold.
The sculptor (Dustin) is on his third wife, Maureen (played by Emma Thompson), is dissatisfied with the level of success he has achieved and is a self-involved and a negligent father to three adult children played by Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller and Homeland’s Elizabeth Marvel.
“I don’t think actors should play parts unless they are in it, otherwise it looks like they are performing a part,” he says.
“They go, ‘Oh so-and-so is an a**hole but I’m not an a**hole so I will just perform an a**hole. I will get a few people in my head that I know