The Mary Sue has unearthed a weirdly moving clip of Dustin Hoffman explaining what his performance in Tootsie taught him about how society values women. While screen-testing his drag makeup, he asked producers to make him more beautiful. “I thought, if I was going to be a woman, I should be beautiful,” he explains. When the makeup artists told him that was as good as it gets, he had a tearful epiphany: He wouldn’t hit on himself at a party. “I think I’m an interesting woman, when I look at myself on screen. I know if I met myself at a party I would never talk to that character because she doesn’t fulfill, physically, the demands we’re brought up to think women have to have in order for us to ask them out.” Watch Hoffman get choked up, thinking of all the interesting women he never knew.
