Her husband walked in with a gun: Oscar winner's real-life affair

Dustin Hoffman once had a gun pointed at him by the husband of the married woman he was seeing. The Oscar winner, 89, told the story on the Nov. 9 episode of the Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend podcast, as his memoir, Look At Me, hit shelves.

"I was having an affair with a married woman," Hoffman recalled. "She thought that once her husband went to sleep, that he stayed asleep."

He didn't.

"I was invited to come over after he went to sleep," Hoffman explained. "There we are, having a festival of sorts and he walked in with a gun. He pointed at me and I remember he said, 'Get out, get out!'"

'That hole is much bigger'

It happened when he was young, E! News reports, but Hoffman said he remembers the fear as if it was yesterday.

"When you have a gun pointed at you, first of all, that hole is much bigger than the actual hole," he said. "And you realize how, any second, any second he's going to pull that trigger because his finger is on the trigger and you think any second he's going to."

"You'd do anything to avoid getting killed," he added.

When O'Brien asked whether the pair "continued the festival" once the husband calmed down, Hoffman's answer was one word: "No."

Then came the cocaine

The memoir has a confession of its own. Hoffman writes that his friend, Paramount boss Bob Evans, introduced him to cocaine in the '70s, after his marriage to Anne Byrne ended, while he was filming the 1976 thriller Marathon Man, Page Six reports.

"God, did I love it," he writes. Luckily, the drug "stuffed me up terribly. The day after I did coke, I could barely breathe."

Marathon Man also gave him one of his favourite gifts. Hoffman writes that he felt "self-conscious" around his co-star Laurence Olivier, so he started calling him "Lordage", which amused the British legend.

When the shoot wrapped, Olivier gave him 12 volumes of the Temple Shakespeare with his own notes in the margins. "These are for you now, dear boy," Olivier told him.

Elsewhere in the book, Hoffman writes about the "terrible" experience he had making The Graduate, and the surprisingly small sum he was left with after paying his expenses on the film, according to Page Six.

These days his love life is far simpler. He married Lisa Gottsegen in 1980 and they have four children; he also shares two children with Byrne.

Lisa told Closer Weekly in 2017 that they're "more in love" than ever. "We work hard at it," she said.

Look At Me, written with Ariel Levy, is out now, and if the podcast is any guide, the gun story is far from its wildest page.