The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

The choice of Hoffman for the role of Benjamin Braddock defined Nichols’s take on the material. In both The Graduate’s screenplay and the novel on which it is based, Benjamin Braddock is rich, popular, a star athlete, and a Big Man on Campus. He’s not one of the Method’s grubby ethnics. But after auditioning actor after actor who beamed Kennedyesque certainty that the world belonged to him, Nichols realized the straightforward approach to the material would never work. Benjamin Braddock might be a WASP, but, as Nichols told Hoffman, “Maybe he’s Jewish inside.” The Graduate needed a lead performance that captured how Benjamin and his generation saw themselves—as misfits who, to paraphrase a song the Beach Boys had sung a year earlier, just weren’t made for these times.