Mayim Bialik created a special bond with Dustin Hoffman and Candice Bergen while making her feature directorial debut As They Made Us.
The two Hollywood heavyweights star as a flawed but happy husband and wife duo, whose children — played by Dianna Agron and Bialik’s Big Bang Theory co-star Simon Helberg — struggle to mend their relationship with Hoffman’s father character as his health rapidly declines.
Although they met as kids growing up in Los Angeles, California, Bialik is proud to have facilitated Hoffman and Bergen’s first time working together on screen.
“They actually knew each other as children,” she said. “They interacted, I think, as teenagers, but they’ve never worked together like this.”
She described Hoffman and Bergen’s on-screen pairing as an “odd couple” — but that’s what she liked about their casting together.
“I liked that you could see a lot of her [Bergen’s] tenderness in special moments, and otherwise she was much more reserved and kind of stoic,” she said. “Candice really brings a real elegance, even to her kind of messiest moments, and I really liked that it’s balanced out by Dustin’s more free-spirited, Bohemian kind of vibe that I love that he brought to this.”
Dianna Agron, Candice Bergen, and Dustin Hoffman in As They Made Us
Also Read: As They Made Us: Mayim Bialik On Writing and Directing Her First Tear-Jerker of a Feature Film
One moment between Candice Bergen and Dustin Hoffman’s characters in As They Made Us really hit home emotionally for Bialik, who was inspired to write the screenplay when her own father passed away.
“That was one of the only moments that I actually teared up, was watching them dance,” she said. “It was really, really beautiful to see them work together. And yeah, it felt like a real couple. It really did. I think there are elements of everyone’s personal life that somehow made it into these scenes.”
She cherishes something Hoffman said on his final day on the set of As They Made Us.
“On Dustin Hoffman’s last day, when he did his last scene, he spoke to the crew and he said to them, ‘This woman,’ he pointed to me, ‘This is a real artist,'” Biailk recalled. “It was very emotional. A lot of our crew took the jobs to be able to kind of watch him work, so to get that kind of compliment from him was, I mean, that was beyond rewarding.”
Bialik also recalls fondly the modest cast party they threw in New Jersey where they shot the movie.
“We were in a small part of New Jersey and we had this funny little wrap party in basically like a small rec room. It looked like the smallest prom ever might take place there,” she said. “Dustin and Candace came in from the city to go to the little wrap party that we had on the weekend. It was so sweet, and that felt rewarding in its own way. Like, they completely didn’t have to, and Dianna came in from the city and that felt really special. They came because they wanted to. We had a really sweet little family we built and so that was rewarding in a different way.”
As They Made Us is now playing in theaters.
Main Image: Dustin Hoffman, Mayim Bialik behind the scenes of As They Made Us. Photo Credit: Cara Howe
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