Actor Dustin Hoffman says, despite how entertained movie watchers might be by “Tootsie,” the hit movie was never really a comedy to him.
In an emotional interview, Hoffman says his role as a man playing female actress Dorothy Michaels really opened his mind about the emphasis placed on physical beauty for women.
Hoffman said, when he saw makeup tests before shooting the film, that the makeup didn’t make him as physically attractive as he thought he could be as a woman.
“I said, ‘Now you have me looking like a woman, make me a beautiful woman,’ because I thought I should be beautiful,” Hoffman said. “And they said to me, ‘That’s as good as it gets. That’s as beautiful as we can get you.’”
That’s when, he says, he had an epiphany.
Hoffman says he told his wife he knew he would be an interesting woman, but that nobody would want to talk to him because he didn’t meet a standard for physical beauty as a woman.
Hoffman was tearful when he said even he had overlooked some women he didn’t see as physically beautiful, saying “There are too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.”
