The 2013 movie Richard Gere wants to delete from history: “They talked me into doing it”
It’s been an interesting career for Richard Gere, who burst onto the scene with the potential to become one of the definitive leading men of his generation, only to semi-deliberately drop the ball.
The success of 1980’s American Gigolo, and the even bigger success of An Officer and a Gentleman two years later, catapulted him toward the upper reaches of the A-list, with Gere being swooned over by audiences across the globe as one of Hollywood’s most desirable heartthrobs and sex symbols.
Those labels have always been just as much of a blessing as they can be a curse, though, and to combat typecasting, the star threw himself into a series of awful movies and box office bombs, and by the end of the ’80s, he was in serious danger of becoming an afterthought.
Salvation can often arrive at the right time, though, and following up an acclaimed, against-type turn in the psychological crime thriller, Internal Affairs, by sparkling opposite Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman helped right the ship, with Gere back on top. At least for a little while, anyway.
History would end up repeating itself, with Gere’s outspoken personal, spiritual, and political beliefs getting him slapped with a two-decade ban from attending the Academy Awards, while he’s named 1997’s Red Corner as the exact moment he found himself quietly blacklisted by mainstream cinema.
Since the turn of the millennium, he’s continued working steadily, although the quality of that work has admittedly been all over the map, but no matter how many horrendous films he makes between now and the end of his career, there’s almost no chance that he’ll ever be in anything as bad as Movie 43 again.
You could say that about almost everyone who appeared in the risible 2013 comedy anthology, with Hugh Jackman confessing that if he had a time machine, he’d travel back and tell himself not to bother. Gere is in the same boat, and when he was asked about it, the actor had already washed his hands of the picture.
“The guy who put it together was the godfather of my stepdaughter and a close friend of my wife,” he explained. “Basically, they talked me into it.” Nepotism in its most heinous form, Gere’s then-wife, Carey Lowell, and her connections had conspired to lure Gere into what stands a good chance of being the worst mainstream comedy to ever disgrace the inside of a cinema.
When quizzed on whether he’d ever be interested in seeing the fruits of his labours, where he plays a tech billionaire who develops a music player that looks like a naked woman, leading to debate over adding a function that automatically cuts the penises off the people who try to have sex with it, he couldn’t have been less interested: “I don’t want to waste my time.”
