The one scene Richard Gere wants to delete from history: “I think it should be destroyed”
Unless they’re pulling double duty and directing themselves or are one of the biggest stars in the business, actors don’t have a say in which footage does or doesn’t make it into the final cut of a film. Richard Gere was neither, so he could only lament that the dailies weren’t destroyed.
At the time, he was definitely a star, just not on the level where he could twist the filmmaker or studio’s arm to ensure that a scene capturing too much realism was tossed onto the pyre. Still, 30 years after the movie in question’s release, he hadn’t forgotten the sequence he’d rather see erased from existence.
Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven gave the actor his first taste of mainstream attention, but Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo propelled Gere to the next level. That breakthrough performance established him as a leading man and also turned him into a heartthrob and sex symbol.
His next picture doubled down on that sentiment and then some, with Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman becoming one of its era’s most beloved romantic flicks. A critical, commercial, and awards season favourite, it won two Academy Awards from six nominations and notched Gere his maiden Golden Globe nod in the ‘Best Actor – Drama’ category.
It was a massive boon for his career, profile, and standing in Hollywood, albeit with one regret. In the first act to establish backstory, Tommy Petersen plays the younger version of Gere’s Zack Mayo before the leading man appears, with the scenes set in the Philippines largely focusing on the relationship between the protagonist and his father Byron, played by Robert Loggia.
When the father and son found themselves interacting with real-life sex workers, Gere felt uncomfortable with what had been caught on camera. “It was an interesting thing,” he told Brad Balfour. “When we set up the first shot, first of all, the footage of my dad and me with the hookers was actually a scene. It took us two days to shoot that thing.”
“I don’t know who has that footage, but I think it should be destroyed,” he said. “The reality that we were getting in that footage was too much.” Three decades after An Officer and a Gentleman‘s release, Gere still remembered that day of shooting, and he wished that somebody would get rid of it for good.
The things people remember about the film the most are either its iconic finale or the fact that Gere and co-star Debra Winger purportedly despised each other despite the chemistry they generated onscreen. For the leading man, though, he’ll never forget how uncomfortable he was on location with his fictional father or lose his desire to see that footage permanently buried.
