Dustin Hoffman was caught in bed with a married woman, and her husband had a gun. The 89-year-old Oscar winner told the story on SiriusXM’s Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, in an episode released on Monday, November 9.
Dustin Hoffman is on a press run for his new memoir, Look at Me, which arrives Tuesday, November 10. Conan O’Brien got more than a book plug.
He also got a confession. Just Jared reported that Hoffman told the host plainly that he had been having an affair with a married woman. Then he described the night it nearly killed him.
The Affair Took Place After the Husband Went to Sleep
Her husband had gone to bed. According to Just Jared, she believed he would stay asleep, so she invited Hoffman to the house.
He didn’t stay asleep.
Her husband woke, walked in, and found the two of them in bed together. Hoffman said the man pointed the weapon straight at him and told him to get out, repeating the order. Hoffman said he remembered the exact words.
Plenty stayed out of the story. Hoffman did not name the woman or her husband. He did not say when it happened. Just Jared noted he also left unclear whether it came before or during his first marriage, to actress Anne Byrne, which ran from 1969 to 1980. He has been married to Lisa Hoffman since 1980, and the couple share four children.
Hoffman Felt His Life Was in Danger During the Incident
Hoffman told O’Brien he genuinely believed he was about to be shot. The man’s finger was on the trigger. A gun, he said, looks a lot bigger from the wrong end.
His thought in that moment, as he recounted it: “I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die.”
He added that someone in that position will do anything to avoid being killed. O’Brien joked about whether he had gone out the window. Hoffman never said how he got out of the house.
Reflections on Infidelity and Its Consequences
Near-death story is how Hoffman tells this, and it is one. Strip away the gun, though, and what remains is a very ordinary affair built on a very ordinary assumption. The husband was asleep. He would stay asleep. Nobody would know.
Affairs run on that kind of math. The person cheating calculates the odds of discovery and decides they are low. The calculation almost always skips the other side of the door. A man who wakes up to find his wife with someone else in his own bed is not living in the same story as the two people who planned the evening. His version starts at the worst possible moment, with no warning and no context.
Hoffman’s account centres on his own fear, which is honest. The husband appears in it only as a voice and a trigger finger. The woman barely appears at all. Whatever happened to her marriage after Hoffman left that house, he did not say, and possibly never knew.
Decades later, it is a podcast anecdote and a chapter of promotion for Look at Me. For the couple in that bedroom, it was something else entirely, and they are the only ones who could say what.
On safer ground, Dustin Hoffman spent the rest of the interview on The Graduate, the 1967 film that made him famous, and how badly that fame sat with him at first. He told O’Brien it made him want to quit movies and go back to theater. He stayed, and made Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie, Rain Man and Hook.
He also kept quiet on how the night finally ended.
Sources: Just Jared, Parade
