How Bruce Willis and Richard Gere became enemies: “It was a fight for daddy’s attention”
After conspiring to fall out with both Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis at various points in his career, Arnold Schwarzenegger appears to be the only member of the Planet Hollywood trio that Richard Gere hasn’t managed to piss off.
His feud with Stallone became the stuff of Hollywood folklore, albeit for one small, furry reason. After Gere was booted from 1974’s The Lords of Flatbush after a bust-up with the Rocky creator, rumours snowballed to such an extent that he was accused of starting the infamous gerbil rumour.
Was he really responsible for spreading the word that Gere was a fan of rodent-assisted colonoscopies? Stallone says no, but it’s not the sort of thing anyone would admit to. On the other hand, his bad blood with Willis is etched in history because the director who tried and failed to smooth the tensions between them shared it firsthand.
The only picture Willis and Gere appeared in together was 1997’s The Jackal, and it was crap. The latter’s accent as Declan Joseph Mulqueen was atrocious; the source novel’s author hated the adaptation so much that he demanded his name be removed from the credits, and it marked an unfitting end to Sidney Poitier’s big-screen career.
As the titular assassin and an IRA sniper, respectively, Willis and Gere barely shared any scenes together. And yet, that didn’t prevent them from repeatedly ending up at each other’s throats. Michael Caton-Jones explained to the Daily Mail that a heated lunch saw the politically opposed actors butt heads.
“Bruce said, ‘Yeah, well, why shouldn’t the film have guns?'” he recalled. “And Richard would say, ‘Well, speaking as a liberal, I’m not sure what I think of that’. Which meant I had to tap-dance between the two. It was a fight for daddy’s attention and at the end of the longest lunch of my life, I thought, ‘Thank fuck they’re not in any scenes together.”
In bad news for the filmmaker, they ended up with one. During a confrontation shot in a subway tunnel, neither man wanted to be the first to leave their trailer as the dick-measuring contest continued to heat up. When they did eventually turn up on the set, Caton-Jones lost his cool when Willis and Gere continued trying to get under each other’s skin.
“I exploded at both of them and told them they were acting like a couple of kids,” he revealed. “Both of them pretended they had no idea what I was talking about.” Potentially indicating where his loyalties lay, or at least who he would have sided with, Caton-Jones clarified that he “liked Richard enormously” but didn’t have anything to say about Willis.
Feuds between stars happen all the time, but it always feels that little bit more pointless when they unfold on a movie that turns out to be shite.
