The “terrific” co-star Richard Gere called “the most brilliant actress you can find”
When you’re as big a star as Richard Gere, you can basically work with whoever you want.
As a reuslt of such privilege, Gere has enjoyed on-screen relationships, both personal and romantic, with some of Hollywood’s biggest names, such as Debra Winger in An Officer and a Gentleman, Jennifer Lopez in Shall We Dance?, Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago, and about a hundred other famous people in Movie 43; OK, maybe that last one isn’t something to be proud of.
However, one collaboration that’s easy to overlook in this star-studded roster is with Jodie Foster, alongside whom Gere starred in the 1993 film Sommersby, playing a man returning home from the American Civil War to his wife, only he might actually be an imposter. Foster’s character must deduce if her ‘husband’ is who he says he is, while also combating emerging feelings for this potential interloper.
Alongside his acting duties, Gere also served as one of the film’s executive producers, which meant that he had influence over who was cast as his onscreen wife and, as we mentioned earlier, he basically had free will to exercise. However, as he explained to The Oklahoman, Foster was the one who made the most sense.
“First, you want the most brilliant actress you can find,” Gere said, “Luckily, she saw this and could see what could be done with the part, and that’s why I needed someone especially who was terrific. Jodie brought a sense of strength. We didn’t want a soft girl playing this part. It had to be someone with great strength and dignity.”
Foster’s character, Laurel Sommersby, would have been very young when her abusive husband first left to fight for the Confederacy, one of the reasons why Gere was drawn to Foster, who is almost 17 years his junior. He wanted the audience to believe that Laurel would have been barely an adult when she was ‘widowed’, forcing her to mature at a rapid pace.
Foster, who would have been in her early 30s at the time, was exactly the age to play a character who had spent a long, hard six years learning how to live by herself in a time that wasn’t exactly friendly to women. It probably didn’t hurt that she’d also appeared in The Silence of the Lambs, one of the biggest films ever, just two years earlier.
The plot of Sommersby isn’t unique, wherein stories of people (usually men) returning from some sort of conflict to assume the life of somebody else have been a staple of fiction for decades; look at Don Draper’s trajectory in Mad Men. Moreover, fans of The Simpsons might recognise the same as the plot to the infamous season nine episode ‘The Principal and the Pauper’, in which it is revealed that Principal Skinner stole the identity of his sergeant in Vietnam, the original title of which, funnily enough, was ‘Skinnersby’, in reference to Gere and Foster’s movie.
Regardless, the film was a success both financially and critically upon its release, helping cement its female lead as a viable box office draw, and Gere still thinks of it fondly today.
