Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman have a long history together. 40+ years ago, the two unknown actors shared an apartment. Holding down part-time jobs while looking for acting work, the two finally hit it big but still share a strong bond of friendship from having struggled together.
“Runaway Jury” marks the first time Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman have starred in a movie together. In this interview with the two legendary actors, Hackman and Hoffman discuss life as roommates, their careers, and working on “Runaway Jury”

This is the third time you’ve played a villain in a John Grisham movie. What’s the attraction?

HACKMAN: It just worked out that way. I wasn't searching for that. It's just one of those things.
You play despicable so well. Is that the real you coming out?

HACKMAN: Well, it's part of me [laughing]. What you always try to do is use various things in our personalities that we may not find attractive, but we find them useful.

How good of a housemate was Dustin back in the day?

HACKMAN: He was the worst. We had to hose the rooms down and sweep them out.

HOFFMAN: I slept on his floor because he had this small bedroom and then, he had this little teeny bit larger room where there was the stove with a board over it. Next to the stove was a tub, which was also the sink, and it had a board over it. I would have to take a bath while they were making breakfast. There was also a toilet next to the bath, and all he's thinking about is that when I had to have my morning bathroom, I didn't care whether they were making eggs or not. He's held that against me for forty years.

HACKMAN: It's true.

Did you two dream of being movie stars then? Would you have thought that was crazy?

HACKMAN: I would've been happy with an off, off-Broadway job and that's what happened. We both started in something like that.


HOFFMAN: Gene Hackman lent me to Bob Duvall because it was the only way he could get me out of his apartment. It's true. I was supposed to stay there for two days and I was there for about three weeks. Bob was working all night at the post office, Gene was working for the Greenwich Village Moving Company, I didn't have a job yet, and the three of us rented out together for years. Each one had a different acting gig and this was coming off of the day with Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson and Troy Donahue and good-looking guys and 'Bonanza.' We were character types meaning we're ugly [laughing].

HACKMAN: Speak for yourself.

HOFFMAN: Well, I was more ugly. It's true. If God had come down and said, “The three of you sign a contract now. You will never get very far, but you'll work. I'll give you a part in an off, off-Broadway show for the rest of your life,” we would've signed in a New York minute. I still don't understand it.

What changed in Hollywood that allowed you to be stars?

HOFFMAN: A decline in the culture [laughing].

HACKMAN: Everyone has a chance if you're lucky enough to find the property. We all three individually were very fortunate.

What do you see as the project that changed your fortune?

HOFFMAN: By the way, just a piece of trivia, the first time that we would have worked together would've been “The Graduate.” Gene was cast as Mr. Robinson and we rehearsed for three weeks. It was at Paramount and Gene and I are in the Paramount bathroom, and I think, in my memory, about six urinals separate us. He looks over at me as he's taking a leak, saying, “I'm going to get fired.” And I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “I'm getting fired today. I can feel it.” And he did, and that opened his career up because Warren Beatty said, “He's not doing it?” And he put him in “Bonnie and Clyde.”

Why did you get fired?

HOFFMAN: He's not a good actor [laughing]. We've known each other for years.

HACKMAN: I got fired, I think, because I just didn't fulfill the director's and the writer's idea of what the part should've been. In rehearsals I do a lot of searching around. I try not to perform and I really feel confident in what I'm doing. I mean, you can go [the] first day and perform and probably won't go further than that. But the way that we were all trained in the 50s and 60s, you needed to keep searching. So I was doing that, and they decided that I was just taking too much time.

So you don’t try and work out a character ahead of time?

HACKMAN: For me, I don't try to work it out ahead of time. I don't know if we work differently.
HOFFMAN: No, both of us have a lot in common. We can't learn lines.

What surprised you the most about finally getting to work together?

HACKMAN: It's funny, I wasn't surprised at all. I felt like we had worked together.

HOFFMAN: We did in school.

HACKMAN: At the Pasadena Playhouse. We did “Of Mice and Men.”

HOFFMAN: He was a brilliant Lenny.

HACKMAN: We also were double cast in “The Taming of the Shrew.” We played the same role.

HOFFMAN: We both played Petruchio.

HACKMAN: I had to wear his tights. I played in the first act and then, Dustin came out and played the same character in the second act. It must've startled people.

HOFFMAN: You know what happened on this movie? He was cast before I was because they were trying to get a movie together. Then I get cast - maybe I was one of the last principles to get cast - and then the director discovers that we knew each other years and years and years ago and hadn't worked together. [He] goes back to the writer and says, “We don't have a scene for them together.” And he goes, “Okay, we're going to write a scene.” The director said, “Take your time.” [The director] decided to shoot the scene, the bathroom scene, the last day of the shoot, but Gene finished his work weeks before and I finished my work weeks before. Now we have to sit every day, waiting as the clock ticks - it's always nice to have a film over with. We show up to do the scene the day before and admit to each other that we hadn't slept the night before, how f**king nervous we were, and it's like eight pages. We had to shoot eight pages, and we weren't going to get through it. So we did the first take and we were terrible, both of us, and yet we embraced each other because we got through it. It was intimidating.

What was so difficult about it?

HOFFMAN: Well first of all, it's hard to shoot a movie and break for a long time and then come back and do, in a sense, one of the biggest scenes that each character had. I thought about it and I think that in a funny way, Gene and I became very good friends very early, and I think that certain things we have in common and one of them is, part of you feels like you're never going to work again. We've both always felt that way. It's a freak accident that we became stars. It's a freak accident that we've been able to have a career. There is a part of us that always feel like we're a fraud. That's enough to make you nervous.

Can you talk about working with John Cusack?

HOFFMAN: Make that answer quick so you can get back to working with me.

HACKMAN: John's an interesting actor…

HOFFMAN: Next question! [laughing]

HACKMAN: John is an interesting actor, and quite a good one. I think that the movie really relies a great deal on his performance. He's really talented.

Gene, how do you approach a character like this after doing it so many time before?

HOFFMAN: When Gene and I spoke about being in this movie and we were here in New Orleans, the first thing I said was, “So, do you have any thoughts about your character?” And he asked if I had thoughts about my character. The first thing that he said was, “I want to make him human.” That's why he's such a good actor. That's the first thing he said. I just wanted to say that.

HACKMAN: I think that pretty much says it all, in a way. I always try to find in these bad guys, something that's human that makes them even more diabolical. If you see someone that's all bad, you kind of just put them in the monster category. But if you see someone who is really bad, but is also a father and a grandfather and all of that, that's even worse, I think.

Dustin, is it a stretch to play an honest lawyer?

HOFFMAN: Well, I mean, it's a lawyer who gets a hit. I felt the same thing that Gene did. I didn't think of him as honest or dishonest. I thought of him as naive because something tells me he's playing like the guy who doesn't believe that technology has even happened and all you need is your own sense. I have a friend who's a lawyer for 35 years and I was once arguing with him about capital punishment. I said there are innocent people there and DNA is proving it, and he said, “No, no, no.” He pissed me off so much, after about a half hour, I said to him, “How can you feel this way?” He just smiled, and said, “Do you want me to take the other side?” That's all they are. They're hired and they do it.

You did some work a while back for gun control. Do you still feel deeply about the subject?

HACKMAN: Yeah, I'm for that. There should be some control of how people acquire guns and that kind of thing. There are just too many guns out there.

HOFFMAN: I could talk for an hour on this because that was my character. I called up the Brady Center For Control Against Gun Violence and the guy who ran it then was Dennis Hannigan. I talked to him for hours. I think that the director liked him and flew him out and we learned about it. After I spent time with this ex-Congressman, my head is filled with statistics. It's so interesting because more than 80% of Americans feel that they're for more gun control, but it doesn't happen because the NRA, The National Rifle Association, is the most powerful lobby that exists. I mean, we're not talking about the right to bear arms, the 2nd Amendment. It was initially conceived, as I understand it, because we needed a militia and now, we have the National Guard. So, you can shoot down a plane, you can buy that. They took it in '86 for Congress to pass legislation to no longer allow bullets that were especially made only to pierce bulletproof vests and to kill cops. 80 people die every day in the United States from violence with guns. 10 of them are kids - 30,000 every year. These are statistics that I took from the Brady Center. More people died last weekend from gun violence than in the entire Iraq war. There are certain aspects in our society that remain hidden and we just say, “What can we do? There's nothing we can do about them.”

You’ve said you have as much fear these days as you had back in acting class. Is that an overstatement?

HACKMAN: No. I still, when I'm getting ready to do a scene, I have a kind of opening night jitters or whatever, but I like that. That's part of the reason that I'm still in the business. There's something at stake; you're not just showing up, you're not a day player, [and] you're not just trying to make a living. The thrill of that is that there's nothing like it, absolutely nothing like it.

Do you work because you have to or do you work because you love it so much?

HACKMAN: It's both. It's still kind of a narcotic. You show up on a set and there are 80 people there waiting for you to do something fun. As I've said before, the pressure of that is fun for me. I don't know, do you like that?

HOFFMAN: Yes, there is something about coming from the stage. It's a different way of acting because you certainly don't have to reach the last person in the audience. I mean, everyone in the movie is sitting in the first row. Aside from that, we knew we were going to be unsuccessful; that was the beauty of it. It frees you. We were out of the Kerouac generation and Ginsberg and the Beat generation. We were going to spend a lifetime being anti-establishment. That was the pretense. “On The Road,” that's the generation that we'd come from. I've always said, as I'm sure that Gene has, “If you become an actor to make it, you're crazy.” 10% work when we started and it's still true now. 90% of the Screen Actors Guild makes what, $7,000, $8,000 a year. And yet, there is a whole difference between actors that just go into film; they want to be stars and all of that. I mean, we f**king love it.

Do younger actors ask either of you for career advice?

HACKMAN: No actor has ever asked me for advice (laughing).

HOFFMAN: When we started out, we wanted to do good work. We used to have arguments and we were passionate, Duvall and Gene and myself, because each of us had a different acting teacher who taught us a different technique or approach. We'd argue whose was the best and we argued about who did better work. There was passion about that. I have found that, I don't know, but they might come up to you and say, “How can I make it?” We never talked in those terms. “How do we make it?”

HACKMAN: Yeah, a lot of young actors will come up to you and say, “How do I get started?” I always tell them the same thing. I say, “Go to New York, find a good acting teacher.” “Yeah, but I really want to go to California and do commercials.” I'm like, “Do that then!” (laughing)

Does putting your name on a script guarantee a movie will get made?

HOFFMAN: No, it meant more in the old days. There are only a handful of people that get a movie made today. Of course, it's based on what the budget is. I heard a rumor the other day, and I don't know if it's true or not, but Michael Douglas who's been very, very successful, some studio didn't want him because the last movie he was in didn't do well. I said to my agent, “It's like it never was before.” It's literally your last time at bat. It's like pitching a no-hitter and the next time, they took him out in the first inning and then suddenly they don't start him again. It all comes down to it's a terrible business today because it's so expensive from a studio perspective. It's a terrible business.

HACKMAN: In a lot of ways, it has nothing to do with how good of an actor you are. It really is a bottom-line kind of decision.

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