Richard Gere refused to watch the worst movie of his career: “It’s a piece of shit”
Big stars make bad movies all the time, but very rarely do a cavalcade of A-listers join forces to create one of the worst films in cinema history. Richard Gere was far from the only household name to sully their reputation with an anthologised abomination, but at least he was smart enough never to watch it.
The actor’s career has been through its fair share of ups and downs, something he’s been happy to admit. After his initial surge in the 1980s that saw him rapidly rise up the industry ladder, Gere cooled off significantly after a string of flops in quick succession saw him phased out of the spotlight.
1990’s one-two punch of Internal Affairs and Pretty Woman rejuvenated his standing in Hollywood, only for Gere to fall out of the limelight before the turn of the millennium. Outside of the odd showcase performance, most notably his Golden Globe-winning turn in Chicago, he’s opted to stay outside of the mainstream and focus his energies on independent film.
However, he was just one of many stars drafted in for a comedy flick that looked like an easy enough gig on paper. All Gere had to do was turn up for a day, shoot his scenes, collect his paycheque, and go home. Innocuous as it may seem, he ended up tarnished by association when Movie 43 was deservedly savaged as a truly wretched piece of work.
Hugh Jackman confessed that he wishes he’d never strapped a set of prosthetic testicles onto his face, which is fair enough. Halle Berry, Gerard Butler, Chris Pratt, Emma Stone, Kate Winslet, Uma Thurman, Naomi Watts, Liev Schrieber, James Gunn, Bob Odenkirk, and the Farrelly brothers are just some of the others who cast a black cloud over their filmographies with Movie 43, not that Gere cared too much.
When asked by The Guardian for his thoughts on the film, which won Razzies for ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, and ‘Worst Screenplay’, he didn’t have many. “Other than apparently, it’s a piece of shit?” he asked. “Nothing. I haven’t seen it.”
How did he end up getting involved with such a wretched picture, then? As it turned out, with a hint of nepotism. “The guy who put it together is the godfather of my stepdaughter, a close friend of my wife,” he explained. “He said, ‘Please would you spend half a day on the movie?’ He showed me the skit and it was quite an innocuous thing, so I did it. I haven’t even thought about it since, to tell you the truth.”
After inexplicably managing to recoup its production budget more than six times over at the box office, Movie 43 has been seen by a lot more people than it should. Those unfortunate souls will never be able to get those 94 minutes of their lives back, whereas Gere didn’t waste so much as a single second on it.
