The role Dustin Hoffman said he “can’t bear” playing: “Oh god, another one”
There aren’t many legendary actors around who can match the movies Dustin Hoffman has made over the years, especially now that Robert Duvall has sadly gone.
Hoffman’s success actually pre-dates the other likely names on that list: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, and Jack Nicholson, thanks to The Graduate, the 1967 comedy that was a colossal global hit and earned him an Oscar nomination at his first time of asking.
For 30 years after that, Hoffman’s list of outstanding films is essentially unrivalled; in every decade he has put in work that will go down in history, from Midnight Cowboy in the ‘60s and Kramer vs Kramer in the ’70s, to Tootsie and Rain Man in the ‘80s and gems like Sleepers in 1996, picking up two Oscars and six Golden Globes on the way.
Hoffman actually found fame relatively late, he was thirty when he made The Graduate, but certainly made up for lost time and had an almost two-decade run where he was known as one of, if not the finest actors in Hollywood, starring in the multi-Oscar nominated Lenny in 1974, the incredible All the President’s Men two years later and finishing off in 1991 with Spielberg’s lavish fantasy Hook.
Thankfully, he also seems to have avoided the paths chosen by his peers, Mr Pacino and Mr De Niro, in not just saying ‘yes’ to pretty much anything that comes with a paycheck attached to it. His record in later life is still reasonably decent, aside from a couple of the Meet the Fockers movies, but one franchise that he’s been involved in for almost twenty years and across four films doesn’t seem to excite him too much.
The Jack Black-voiced Kung Fu Pandas have been going since the first instalment way back in 2008, with Hoffman featuring in each of the films since as the voice of ‘Master Shifu’, the wise and sage martial arts master who also happens to be a red panda, of course. No doubt Hoffman brought in a pretty penny over the series, otherwise he wouldn’t have done them, but did he at least enjoy the process? Absolutely not.
He told The Guardian about making the animations, saying, “I can’t bear it. There was five years between 2 and 3 and it’s: ‘Oh God, they’re doing another one.’”
It seems Hoffman would have preferred to be recording his lines with the other stars of the movie, like Black and Angelina Jolie, but instead was locked in a booth with the director, adding: “It was like my first day of acting class for the next four months.”
Unfortunately for Hoffman, but fortunately for his bank balance, he’s likely going to have to repeat that process quite soon, because Kung Fu Panda 5 has been confirmed to be on the way, probably hitting cinemas at some point between now and 2028, at which point Hoffman will be 90.
In the meantime, though, he’s keeping busy making a new Netflix-backed film with Adam Sandler called Time Out, plus he’s wrapped filming on a movie with Alison Brie named The Revisionist. As if that weren’t enough for an octogenarian, he also answered the call from Andy Garcia, who is directing a new movie named Diamond, with a frankly amazing cast featuring Hoffman, Bill Murray, Brendan Fraser and Robert Patrick.
