“I’ve turned down some wonderful projects”: the reasons behind Dustin Hoffman’s repeated rejection of cinema icons
Rejection is part and parcel of the film business for anyone who uses it to make a living, but Dustin Hoffman does at least have his reasons for turning down multiple movies that would go on to become classics.
History isn’t short of thespians who’ve turned away from parts that go on to become legendary characters, Oscar-winning performances, or pop culture icons in other hands. Still, Hoffman is one of the few who made a point of digging into the specificities and explaining why none were the right career moves at the time.
Not that he hasn’t been in his own fair share of classics, obviously, but a career that’s already enjoyed decades of success and delivered two Oscars for ‘Best Actor’, a quartet of Baftas, two Primetime Emmys, and six Golden Globes could have been even more impressive if it wasn’t for Hoffman’s reticence.
He’s shone brightly in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, Barry Levinson’s Rain Man, Robert Benton’s Kramer v Kramer, Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie, Alan J Paluka’s All the President’s Men and many more, working with high-powered auteurs like Steven Spielberg and David O Russell in the process.
Chewing on the scenery in Spielberg’s Hook was the one and only time they’ve worked together, but it could have been three were it not for Hoffman’s habit of politely declining. “Spielberg says I’ve turned him down more than any other actor,” he acknowledged to The Guardian, before outlining how he earned that tag.
In addition to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Hoffman additionally knocked back Amistad – or “the one about slaves” as he called it, referred to Always as “a love story Richard Dreyfuss did,” and was the first choice for Ben Kingsley’s role as Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List. In short, he’s made one Spielberg flick and said no to a further four, with that persistence to cast him eventually paying off.
“I’ve turned down some wonderful projects,” Hoffman confessed, before pointing to Ingmar Bergman’s first English-language feature The Touch as another. When he passed, Max Von Sydow was drafted in instead, with the Swedish titan preferring someone he knew very well over the studio’s suggested replacements of either Paul Newman or Robert Redford.
Why did he turn it down? “Because my first wife was pregnant and didn’t want to leave her obstetrician in New York to go to Sweden.” It’s fair to put family first, but Hoffman then immediately hinted that he wasn’t being entirely truthful by suggesting how anyone “can find reasons not to do anything.”
That’s Spielberg and Bergman chalked off, but were there any more directors who stand proudly among the greatest to ever grace the world of cinema that tried to recruit Hoffman for a project and were met with the latest in what was rapidly become a career-long trend of refusals? Of course there was.
“I turned Fellini down,” he admitted. 1980’s City of Women was an Italian production with a predominantly Italian cast, but Hoffman could have shaken things up as a rare American headliner. Instead, he didn’t care too much for the technical specifications of the shoot, which, in his mind, left him with no other option.
“He didn’t shoot with regular sound,” he sought to justify. “He’d shoot just with a guide track because everything is dubbed there, and I thought it would compromise the performance. I said I’d pay for it to be done in direct sound, and he said no, that’s not the way he worked. I love Fellini, and I turned him down. I always looked for reasons not to do something.”
He did get around to Spielberg eventually, but Bergman and Fellini didn’t circle back around for a second bite at the Hoffman-shaped cherry. The vast majority of actors working at the same time those two heavyweights were still active would have bitten off plenty of hands to get that chance, but like Hoffman intimated, he always found a way to explain his aversions.
