The iconic role Richard Gere was coerced into playing: “There was a potential lawsuit going on”
Richard Gere is one of Hollywood’s most famous Buddhists, which probably came in handy during one moment in his career when things got a bit frenetic regarding a particular role. The actor got his start in the theatre in the late 1960s and appeared on Broadway throughout the ’70s. He got his big Hollywood break in Richard Brooks’s 1977 film Looking for Mr Goodbar before landing his first leading role in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, setting him on a path toward stardom.
Gere has expressed ambivalence about Hollywood over the years, but fame had a way of finding him anyway, and that materialised in no small part because of Paul Schrader. Sometime after the Broadway run of Bent in 1979, Gere was relaxing in a rented house in Malibu. He’d been working on back-to-back projects and was in desperate need of some time off, but Schrader had something else in mind.
At the time, the filmmaker was most well known for having written the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and had directed two X-rated movies, 1978’s Blue Collar and 1979’s Hardcore. When he called Gere, he told him with great urgency that he wanted him to star in a new movie he was making called American Gigolo and that he needed a yes or no answer by the end of the day.
“I just laughed,” Gere recalled in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast earlier this year. He asked if he could read the script at least, and Schrader sent it over, repeating that he needed to know whether he was in or out within the day. Gere wasn’t thrilled about the predicament, though he liked the script. Eventually, he managed to get Schrader to agree to let him think it over until the morning.
“I didn’t know what his situation was,” Gere said. “There was another actor involved… There was a potential lawsuit going on. It was all stuff going on. That’s why there had to be an answer now.” In fact, shooting was scheduled to start in two weeks, which was really bringing things down to the wire. John Travolta had originally been cast in the title role but dropped out when his mother died.
Christopher Reeve, known to Hollywood as Superman, turned it down, as did Chevy Chase, of all people. Gere had been Schrader’s first choice, but it all had to happen quickly. “I just I took a deep breath and took a shot,” the actor said, “Because I liked the script and I liked him.”
It was much easier said than done. He was playing a high-class escort in American Gigolo, a character who looks like he’s just stepped out of a perfume advert. The actor claimed he had never worn a suit in his life at that point and found the whole character extremely alien. He described it as the first time he ever dove into something, and it was clearly the right move, at least from an outsider’s perspective. It turned him into a star and a sex symbol, paving the way for him to play impossibly smooth, suited, debonair white-collar characters for much of his career.
