Richard Gere’s arrogant first encounter with Robert De Niro: “We couldn’t believe he did it”
Aspiring actors working as waiters is one of the industry’s most well-worn cliches, with countless future superstars grafting away in restaurants while waiting on their big break. Richard Gere was just one of many jobbing thespians who made a living in the service industry, but he was confident he’d make it.
Gere started his career treading the boards, most notably inheriting John Travolta’s role as Danny Zuko for the stage version of Grease in the early 1970s. He always had his sights set on cinema, even if his first time being cast in a motion picture couldn’t have gone much worse.
He was famously hired to play a role in 1974’s The Lords of Flatbush, only to get into an altercation with co-star and fellow unknown Sylvester Stallone, which culminated in Gere being given his marching orders and the soon-to-be Rocky figurehead insinuating that Gere blamed him for starting the gerbil rumour.
Gere eventually made his feature debut the following year in the crime drama Report to the Commissioner, and it wasn’t long before he started gaining attention. Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, and Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman had cemented his star by the early 1980s, not that it came as a surprise to the cocksure performer.
Before any of that happened, and when nobody in the business had a clue who he was, Gere waited tables at a restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village. One of the eatery’s regular customers was Robert De Niro, who’d recently started production on a feature with Martin Scorsese. Seizing his opportunity, the upstart waltzed right up to the table and made a bold proclamation.
“This was just when De Niro had begun filming Taxi Driver, and he was really in character that afternoon,” one of Gere’s former co-workers recalled to Vanity Fair. “Everyone was afraid of him. Not Richard. He went right up in his face and pointed at him and said, ‘Man, just you wait’. Someday, I’m going to be as famous as you are’. We couldn’t believe he did it. But Richard was a passionate guy.”
Knowing De Niro’s preference for remaining in character during his most intense films, there’s something blackly hilarious about a fresh-faced Richard Gere literally walking up to Travis Bickle in the middle of a busy restaurant and telling him that one day, the guy serving him his food is going to be a bigger draw and more famous face in Hollywood.
Gere certainly wasn’t lacking in confidence, but did he hold up his end of the bargain? Technically, he did, with his most successful movies consistently earning more at the box office than De Niro’s after he cracked the A-list in the ’80s. It was fleeting, though, because it would take a bold cinephile to even suggest Gere will be remembered as the more famous of the two.
