Actor Dustin Hoffman, now 75, shared an epiphany he had while shooting Tootsie in 1982, tearing up during a recent interview about it.
Hoffman played an actor in the film trying to get a role on a soap opera, and in it, he poses as a woman, Dorothy Michaels. But along the way, he said he realized how judgmental he was.
In an interview with AFI from December which is now going viral, he said when watching the footage back, he was “shocked that I wasn't more attractive,” The Hollywood Reporter reports. When he asked the makeup artists to make him look “more beautiful” they told him, “That's as good as it gets.”
Remembering a conversation he had with his wife, Hoffman explained, “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 to ask them out.'"
He added, "There's too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.”