There is no question that Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man is one of Dustin Hoffman’s most celebrated roles. Hoffman won his second career Oscar for the role in the Barry Levinson-directed hit co-starring Tom Cruise as Ray’s brother, Charlie. The movie, which can be seen with an HBO Max subscription, received widespread acclaim, winning Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay at the 1989 Oscars. Cruise, however, wasn’t nominated (he has still never won an Oscar), which is a shame, because not only is he great in Rain Man, but he also played a key role in Hoffman staying with the movie, even though he “fired himself” on the first day of filming.
The legendary Hoffman recently sat down with GQ to do a career retrospective, and when talking about Rain Man, he told the story of how he really hated the way things were going on the first day of production. He thought his own performance of the autistic Ray was so poor that he told Levinson he would be happy to pay for the time, but he wanted to bail out early. Hoffman said of that first day:
It was a scene where we're standing around a car, Tom Cruise and I, and I said I'm quitting. I can't do this. It's awful. And I knew it was awful, and it was. And I went up to the director, Barry Levinson, and I said, ‘I'm firing myself. I don't know what I'm doing. What I say sounds like…like five different parts I played in films. I'm putting them all [together] because I don't know what I'm doing.’
Levinson, to his credit, didn’t want to hear that from Hoffman and convinced him to stick with it for a couple of weeks, because he trusted that Hoffman would find the character. So Hoffman stayed on, but still had serious doubts. They went on for a few days, and Hoffman was still frustrated, unable to really find Raymond’s core.
While praising Cruise for his work ethic (and presumably his patience), Hoffman talks about another scene between the two actors as they drive across the country later in the movie. Shot after shot, Cruise was ad-libbing, and Hoffman, in his own words, explains that he just hated what he (Hoffman) was doing across from Cruise:
We had to do a scene where we're both in the car. He's driving, and I'm sitting in the passenger seat. It's about 10 minutes of film in each camera. So, you know, do the 10 minutes that's in each [reel] and then just improvise. We do it two or three times, and I can't do it. And so when we were doing the scene, and he was brilliantly improvising.
This goes on for reel after reel, and Hoffman still isn’t feeling it. He went one:
We do it, we do it for hours. And I say to Barry, I can't, I really can't do it. He says, come here, I think, I think I found something. And on the two-shot, on both of us, Tom is asking me questions, and all I'm saying is, ‘Yeah,’ because I don't know what the fuck else to say. I don't have an idea of this guy.
What Levinson had found in those scenes was that Hoffman had Ray. Hoffman realized that Levinson was right. He had found the character, and the rest is history. Rain Man and Dustin Hoffman would go on to win all those awards, and the movie remains, almost 4 decades later, one of the most beloved movies of the era. It really is too bad Cruise didn’t get the recognition he clearly deserved for one of his best roles.
