The movie Richard Gere is proudest of: “I’ll be totally clear and honest with you”
Richard Gere has had a profoundly ambivalent relationship with Hollywood from the beginning. He might be known for playing impossibly suave ladies’ men in glossy crowd-pleasers, but he began his career as an itinerant theatre actor content with honing his craft in relative obscurity. All of that changed when he landed the lead role in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven in 1978. It changed his life and set him on an uneasy path to Hollywood stardom.
The characters that most of us associate with Gere are the ones he had to be forced and cajoled into playing. In 1979, Paul Schrader asked him to replace John Travolta in American Gigolo, and Gere wanted nothing to do with it. He turned him down on the spot, but the filmmaker was insistent, and he eventually strong-armed the actor into accepting. Although Gere claimed to have never worn a suit before then, American Gigolo proved that he was born to be an Armani model. Like it or not, the film made the young actor a sex symbol, and that label has stuck with him all the way through to his current ‘silver fox’ era.
Pretty Woman was a similar situation. Again, Gere didn’t want to do it, believing that the character he was supposed to play was two-dimensional. Director Garry Marshall was no fool, however, and he knew exactly how to get the star to change his mind. He put Gere in a room with Julia Roberts, and the rest is history. No one, no matter how jaded, could be immune to the blinding charisma of Roberts.
These are the roles for which Gere will always be remembered – the suave, slightly aloof millionaire who is just as easy to watch in a legal thriller as in a rom-com. However, no matter how many decades go by, the actor himself has bristled at the association and sought projects that challenge it. In this regard, no movie has been as polar-opposite as Time Out of Mind, a 2014 drama about homelessness.
Directed by Oren Moverman, the film stars Gere as George, an unhoused man in New York who tries to mend his broken relationship with his daughter Maggie (Jena Malone). Gere first read the script sometime around 2004 and, again, had no interest in doing it. “But it was just one of those things that I kept thinking about, and I ended up buying the script,” he explained in an interview with Awards Daily. “I even thought about directing it at one point.”
Aside from the obvious differences between George and Gere’s usual roles, the film itself was a completely new type of production for him. They shot it in 21 days on the streets of New York with long lenses to avoid making their presence obvious. They even shot some scenes with hidden cameras. According to Gere, no one recognised him. In fact, people actively avoided him.
“A homeless person is worse than invisible,” he said, adding, “I learned that through this character.”
Despite his initial hesitation about making the movie, Gere ended up seeing it as a highlight of his career. In a 2021 interview with Jason Fraley, he said, “I’ll be totally clear and honest with you: Of all the things I’ve done, I can’t think of anything I’m more proud of than this.”
