The plan depended on one thing: The husband would go to sleep and stay asleep. As Dustin Hoffman tells it, the first part went fine.

The 89-year-old actor recalled the encounter on Monday’s episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend while promoting his upcoming memoir, Look at Me. Hoffman asked O’Brien whether anyone had ever pointed a gun at him. O’Brien said no. Hoffman had a story about the time someone pointed one at him.

It happened in his youth, Hoffman said, when he was having an affair with a married woman. She invited him over after her husband had gone to bed, figuring that once he fell asleep, he wouldn’t wake up. Hoffman went over. The two were in bed, having what he delicately called “a festival of sorts,” when the husband walked in with a gun.

He pointed it at Hoffman. The actor still remembers what the man said: “Get out, get out.”

What stuck with Hoffman all these years wasn’t just the command. It was how big the opening at the end of the gun looked when he was staring straight into it. He could see the man’s finger on the trigger. Suddenly, all that mattered was whether that finger was going to move.

“You realize, that’s it. I’m gonna die,” Hoffman recalled. “You will do anything to avoid getting killed.”

Hoffman didn’t name the woman or her husband, and he described the encounter only as something that happened when he was young. But he remembered the detail that made the whole setup seem safe at the time: She was sure her husband wouldn’t wake up. Decades later, he could still hear the man telling him to get out.