Richard Gere names “the hardest thing I have ever done” for a role
Although it’s not a requirement, actors often learn the skills of the figures they play on-screen in order to gain a better understanding of their character and enhance their performance, which saw Richard Gere take on the toughest task of his entire career.
He’s not what anybody would call a method practitioner, not that it stopped him from becoming one of the biggest stars in Hollywood at his peak. Every aspiring star dreams of a breakout role that turns them from jobbing thespian into a bankable leading man, and Gere found his in 1980.
American Gigolo recouped its budget ten times over at the box office, made Gere one of the industry’s foremost sex symbols, and opened the doors to a hot streak that kept on bringing him to new heights. Moving on to An Officer and a Gentleman, Breathless, Internal Affairs, or Pretty Woman, he was a certified A-lister.
None of those aforementioned films forced him to go to exorbitant or extraordinary lengths to do justice to the parts he was playing. His most taxing research came in a quaint literary adaptation, which ended up bombing in cinemas and receiving a response from critics and audiences that could very generously be described as tepid.
Co-directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the big screen translation of Myla Goldberg’s novel Bee Season stars Gere as an overbearing father who takes a keener interest than ever in his 11-year-old daughter’s life when she wins a major spelling bee. That shift in the family dynamic affects not only the father/daughter relationship but also the bonds between the patriarch, Juliette Binoche’s wife, and Max Minghella’s oldest son.
Beyond being a university professor of religious studies and a devout follower of Judaism, Gere’s Saul is also a keen violinist. It wasn’t a trait the star carried before he signed on, but he gave it his best shot. “I play the violin in this movie. I had to learn the violin,” he told IGN. “Which is the hardest thing I have ever done.”
It’s better to try and fail than not try at all, and in Gere’s case, his best efforts proved to be for nought. “And in the end, it wasn’t me,” he admitted. “I had these visions that I was going to be playing my own violin, but I couldn’t do it.” Cruelly, the task he described as the hardest thing he’s ever had to do for any movie was for nothing, but after it was decided, he wasn’t convincing enough to pull it off when the cameras were rolling.
It must have been a real kick in the teeth for Gere to commit himself to learning the violin, only for his dreams to be dashed when he hadn’t mastered it to an extent satisfying enough for the filmmakers, who cast him aside in favour of a double.
