Relatable Leslie Jones Thought Dustin Hoffman Was Al Pacino
“First of all, you all need to know I’m ignorant,” explained Leslie Jones to the studio audience at Late Night with Seth Meyers this week. “I have no chill whatsoever.” All self-effacing aside, who among us isn’t capable of a little celebrity misidentification, especially when it comes to mistaking brooding actor Dustin Hoffman for brooding actor Al Pacino?
Her story: Jones was standing in front of a hotel when she spotted a familiar face. She eagerly approached ‘Al Pacino,’ gushing her love and calling him one of the best actors in the business. Oh, the work he did in The Godfather! Jones poured it on thick for one of the greatest actors of his generation. But the thespian didn’t return the compliments, only staring back at Jones before silently getting inside a car that pulled away.
What gives? Jones’s friend clued her in. “You know that was Dustin Hoffman, right?”
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It was a forehead-slapping moment for Jones. “Dustin Hoffman was probably like, ‘Latifah be trippin’.”
But cheer up, Leslie Jones! This wasn’t a first-time happenstance for Hoffman. In the late 1970s, the Tootsie star showed up for a screening of Days of Heaven in New York. After the movie, an excited fan greeted the actor with an animated "Al, Al, Al! Hi!" In this case, Hoffman set the record straight. "You must have mistaken me for Al Pacino," he said. "I'm Robert De Niro."
Pacino gets it all the time, admitting that fans greet him with both “Hi, Dustin!” and “how you doing, Bob?”, mistaking him for DeNiro. “(Hoffman and DeNiro) get the same thing,” Pacino says. “But I can understand it – we are those three actors who came out of the 1970s and I think sometimes that gets confusing.”
If that’s the case, Hoffman, would a “Hello, I’m Dustin” nametag be too much to ask?
