The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

For his first thirty years on this earth, Dustin Hoffman’s dream of being an actor seemed destined to remain unrealized. He had studied with Lee Strasberg and become a devotee of the Method, but he was too odd and too abrasive to get regular work. He had even been voted least likely to succeed when studying at the Pasadena Playhouse, and seemed poised to prove his peers right. Then, in 1966, Alan Arkin cast Hoffman in Eh?, a hit Off-Broadway comedy. Reviewers compared him to Buster Keaton, and he caught the eye of Mike Nichols, who was struggling to fill the role of The Graduate’s protagonist, Benjamin Braddock. Nichols flew Hoffman out to Los Angeles for an audition that the young actor would remember as “maybe one of the most demeaning I’ve ever had.”