One of Dustin Hoffman’s most notable films, “Tootsie,” changed the way this well-known actor viewed women and beauty, and a video of an interview he did on the subject is going viral.
In a 2012 interview with the American Film Institute that has resurfaced, Hoffman talked about what happened when he agreed to play an out-of-work actor who decides to dress and act as a woman to get parts. In preparing for the part, Hoffman told AFI that he was shocked he wasn’t more attractive as a woman and his first instinct was to tell the make-up artists to make him beautiful.
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That was a turning point for Hoffman, who saw the film less as a comedy and more as a lesson he needed to learn. In the AFI clip, Hoffman said that realizing he thought he had to be beautiful to play a woman brought about a moment of epiphany, and he talked to his wife about it.
“I went home and started crying, talking to my wife,” NBC News reported Hoffman said during the interview. “And I said I have to make this picture, and she said, ‘Why?’ 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 for us to ask them out.”
Tearing up during the AFI video, Hoffman said, “I said, ‘There’s too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.”
The video is a year old and the movie is decades old, but the sentiments Hoffman expressed are reaching people on the Internet, who are sharing the video everywhere.
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