The Oscar-winning 1987 role Richard Gere regrets turning down: “That was a wonderful character”
Few things will drag an actor out of a career slump faster than winning an Academy Award, which could have happened to Richard Gere, had he not turned down the role.
In the late 1980s, things were looking pretty grim. Gere had broken out as a leading man, heartthrob, and sex symbol at the beginning of the decade with American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman, but, believe it or not, making a lot of shite movies in the space of a few years will slow anyone’s momentum.
On one hand, he brought it on himself, and he did it on purpose. The actor didn’t want to be categorised as a one-note, one-dimensional star who’d be defined by those smouldering parts that had audiences swooning in the aisles, but when he zagged, he zagged straight into critical and commercial disaster.
Almost everything that Gere touched between An Officer and a Gentleman and 1990’s one-two punch Internal Affairs and Pretty Woman turned to shit, and things had gotten so bad that even his representatives were beginning to fear that his 15 minutes of fame were well and truly over.
He bounced back eventually, before being bounced out again when he claimed he was blacklisted by mainstream Hollywood for his outspoken and unyielding support of Tibet, but things would have been looking pretty rosy had he taken to the stage at the Oscars and claimed a ‘Best Actor’ trophy.
When Oliver Stone first boarded 1987’s Wall Street, the studio tried foisting Warren Beatty on him as Gordon Gekko. He didn’t want Beatty; he wanted Gere. So off he went, only for Gere to pass on the offer, and in the four decades since, he’s voiced his regret about that decision more than once.
Still, like the trouper he is, the star put a brave face on it. “That was a wonderful character, and no one could have done that better than Michael Douglas,” he declared, possibly with a single tear rolling down his cheek. “Nobody on the planet,” he reiterated for emphasis, making it sound awfully like he was trying to convince himself, more than anyone else.
Are you sure, though, Richard Gere? Are you sure there wasn’t one actor on the planet who could have played the face of ‘greed is good’ better than the guy who won an Oscar for it? Someone named Richard Gere, perhaps? Instead, he appeared in precisely zero movies that year, and the one he made the following year, Miles from Home, returned less than $200,000 from the box office.
Meanwhile, Douglas was the recipient of the only Oscar Wall Street was nominated for, cementing the picture’s place in history as the only movie ever made to win both an Academy Award and a Golden Raspberry for acting, with Darryl Hannah’s Razzie for ‘Worst Supporting Actress’ giving it the ignominious record.
