Before Robin Williams put on heels in Mrs. Doubtfire or Tyler Perry donned Madea’s wig, Dustin Hoffman played Dorothy Michaels in Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie, which became an instant success and garnered an Academy Award nomination for Hoffman.

As fans of the film will remember, Hoffman plays an actor down on his luck, trying to see whether or not being a women would mean more success for his career. Being a comedy, the film only brushes the surface of the dynamics between men and women and what it really means to be either. But in an interview with the American Film Institute last year, Hoffman emotionally and candidly reveals the way that working on the film gave him a new perspective on what it means to be a woman.

The question that catalyzed the revelation was one from a friend of Hoffman’s- “if you were born a woman, how would you be different?” Hoffman notes the distinction between that and the question, “what would it feel like to be the opposite sex?”

“I did go to Columbia and I asked them if they would spend the money to do makeup tests so that I could look like a woman, and if I couldn’t look like a woman, they would agree not to make the movie…. I felt that unless I could walk down the streets of New York dressed as a woman and not have people turn and say, ‘who’s that guy in drag’ and ‘who’s that freak’… I didn’t want to make that film…I was shocked that I wasn’t more attractive… I said, ‘now you have me looking like a woman, now make me look like a beautiful woman’… they said, ‘that’s as beautiful as we can get you’… I went home and started crying, talking to my wife, and said, ‘I have to make this movie.'”

He gets most emotional when he says, “I think that I’m an interesting woman, that character, because she doesn’t physically fill the demands that we’re brought up thinking women have to have in order for us to ask them out…they’re too many interesting women I haven’t had the experience of knowing in this life because I have been brainwashed… that was never a comedy for me.”

Being the only male actor who has really come out and talked about their perspective gained dressing up as a female character in film, it’s really interesting to see how method acting really personifies the idea walking in another’s shoes. A lot of the profundity of the statements that Hoffman makes is really in the implications of what’s in what’s left unsaid- the danger of the lingering existence of male chauvinism, as well as what our culture still defines today as “beauty.”

See the full interview below: