Dustin Hoffman reveals how real-life Mrs. Robinson sex romp almost turned deadly: 'He walked in with a gun'

The lyrics 'God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson / Heaven holds a place for those who pray,' could have shot through Dustin Hoffman's panicked mind when his married lover's husband held him at gunpoint.

The actor, 89, has revealed that he was busted having a tawdry May–December affair much like the one featured in the iconic film that made him a movie star, The Graduate (1967), which earned him the first of seven Academy Award nominations.

The two-time Oscar winner spilled the dirty details after host Conan O'Brien jokingly asked if he'd ever had a gun pulled on him on the Monday, November 9 episode of his Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast. 

'Yes, I did. I was having,' Hoffman started, before faltering and clarifying, 'this was in my youth, youth. I was having an affair with a married woman.'

A stunned O'Brien responded, 'Oh.'

Hoffman continued with his arms crossed nervously across his chest, 'And she thought that once her husband went to sleep, that he stayed asleep.' 

To which O'Brien once again deadpanned: 'Oh.' 

'I was invited to come over after... he went to sleep,' the Midnight Cowboy icon recalled. 

'And there we are, having a festival of sorts. And he walked in with a gun. And he pointed at me. And he said, I remember what he says, "Get out, get out!"'

Hoffman continued with his finger pointing dramatically, 'And when you have a gun pointed at you, first of all ... his finger is on the trigger. And you think any second, "he's going to," and you realize, "it's it, it's it, it's it. You're going to, I'm going to die! I'm going to die!"'

The Hollywood veteran – who is making the media rounds promoting his new memoir, Look at Me, which hits shelves on Tuesday, November 10 – admitted that the coitus interruptus rocked him to his cheating core. 

'The next second, the next second, the next second,' he stuttered. 'And you do anything. You will do anything, you know, to avoid getting killed.' 

O'Brien, of course,  cracked wise in response: 'So you jumped out the window? You ran away? Continued the festival?'

Hoffman then cut the exchange short with a plaintive, 'No,' eliciting raucous laughter from the podcast's crew.

The Daily Mail has reached out to Hoffman's representative for comment but has not yet received a response. 

Meanwhile, the actor has been much more forthcoming about his 'terrible experience making the movie that changed my life' despite it being his breakthrough role in Hollywood.

In an extract from Look At Me, published by The New Yorker, the Tootsie actor claims that he was slapped 27 times by his Graduate costar Katharine Ross, at the instruction of their director, Mike Nichols, whom he labeled a 'sadist.'

'The scene has Benjamin [Hoffman] run into Elaine's [Ross] room, soaking wet from the rain, to tell her that he's had an affair with an older woman; within seconds, Elaine realizes the woman is her mother,' Hoffman writes. 

'Mike just kept telling Katharine to hit me, to hit me harder. Katharine worried she would hurt me, and I told her, "I'm OK. Just don't hit my ear." Unfortunately, she missed a few times. I was dizzy by the end of that day, and Mike didn't even use the slap in the film.' 

Hoffman added that he grew suspicious that Nichols was 'angry at me, either because I was doing something wrong or because he had realized what everybody else already knew, that he had miscast the lead in his film.'

He continued: 'I felt immediately uncomfortable, unworthy. Here I was, playing a starring role in a movie by Mike Nichols, who was the director of the moment, but I felt like I had no right to be there.'

Nichols, who died of a heart attack in 2014, had earned auteur status the year before The Graduate was filmed after directing Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in his Oscar-winning adaptation of playwright Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Dustin landed the role of Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate after a lengthy two-year casting process, beating out blond, blue-eyed Robert Redford for the part. 

The classic film follows Benjamin, a recent college graduate who is seduced by an older married woman, Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), even as he falls for her daughter, Elaine (Ross).

But Dustin has now said the role 'exacerbated all my insecurities from the start.'

'When my agent said that Mike was interested in me, I didn't even want to try out for the part. I had read the Charles Webb novel that Mike was adapting, and it was obvious that I was all wrong for Benjamin,' he wrote.

'A track star and straight-A student, the head of the debate team – this was an affluent, all-American kid, whose surname was "Braddock". Why would you cast a person who looks as ethnic as I do to play the ultimate Wasp? It made absolutely no sense.'

Hoffman wrote that he has reconsidered Mike's behavior over the years.

He came to believe that Nichols was using Benjamin as a kind of surrogate, projecting his own emotional difficulties and self-loathing onto the character.

Dustin suggested that he himself had become a stand-in for Mike's personal struggles as a man who came to the United States from Germany as a young Jewish boy in 1939. 

'He was looking for an alter ego - that's why Benjamin had taken years to cast, and maybe that’s why he was so hard on me,' Hoffman writes. 'I was a stand-in, there to absorb Mike’s own self-loathing.'