The iconic role Richard Gere refused to play: “He had no interest in the project”
The hardest thing for any actor who’s been anointed as a star in the making is capitalising on that momentum to ensure they live up to the billing. Richard Gere was hailed as Hollywood’s newest heartthrob and sex symbol, and the obvious issue was that he hated it.
Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo and Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman combined to propel Gere to superstardom, making him an object of desire for millions of audience members. He wanted to be taken seriously as an actor, but he ended up shooting himself in the foot, putting his career on life support by the end of the 1980s.
In his own words, Gere “fucked up” his short-term future. He could have risen to the top of the A-list, but instead, he opted to star in duds like The Honorary Consul, King David, Miles From Home, and No Mercy, all of which bombed at the box office. Fortunately, salvation was lurking around the corner, with 1990 the definitive turning point.
Mike Figgis’ crime thriller Internal Affairs and Garry Marshall’s smash hit rom-com Pretty Woman were the shot in the arm that Gere needed to revive his flagging career, even if it wasn’t long before he was pushed to the fringes of the mainstream. However, things would have turned out very differently had he accepted the offer to play John McClane in Die Hard, when he was producer Joel Silver’s first choice.
Of course, he wasn’t the only one to turn down the chance to run shoeless around the Nakatomi Plaza, but Silver pushed harder for Gere than anyone else. “Gere turned it down, saying he had no interest in the project,” Elia Mell wrote in Casting Might-Have-Beens. “Producer Joel Silver wanted Gere so much that he added another million dollars to the actor’s proposed salary in order to get him to sign on.”
In the end, everyone else’s loss was the biggest gain possible for Bruce Willis. Almost every viable leading man in the business had rejected Die Hard, and in a last roll of the dice, 20th Century Fox decided to shell out $5million to secure an actor best known for co-starring in Moonlighting.
It was far from a sure thing, with Willis’ presence being minimised in the posters and trailers when it was discovered that audiences could be heard laughing when his face appeared as the frontman for an all-action blockbuster, but it would be an understatement to say he got the last laugh when McClane became his career-defining role and Die Hard continues to spawn a thousand lesser imitators.
It’s hard to imagine Gere taking down Hans Gruber, but maybe that’s because Willis turned out to be perfect for the part. If he’d taken it, there’s a chance his post-Pretty Woman comeback wouldn’t have been so fleeting.
