Murray steps up for Hoffman
Appearing on the same stage where months earlier Dustin Hoffman faced questions about alleged sexual harassment, Bill Murray praised the actor as a “really decent person.”
“Dustin Hoffman is a great man,” Murray said at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y. “He’s a really sweet man.”
Murray was interviewing his former agent, Michael Ovitz, whose memoir has just been published. Murray and Hoffman were Ovitz clients when they worked in the 1982 film Tootsie. During an event last December, Hoffman was chastised by interviewer John Oliver over allegations he had groped an intern while making a TV movie of Death of a Salesman in the 1980s. Hoffman denied any wrongdoing and said Oliver was making “an incredible assumption” about him.
Ovitz himself has praised the #MeToo movement. In his memoir, Who is Michael Ovitz? the former head of the Creative Artists Agency writes that “a reckoning has come”.