Richard Gere: still a sex symbol at 67
He’s one of Hollywood’s favourite leading men, but his recent movie Norman is a complete change of direction and already being Oscar-touted. Chrissy Iley meets the enigmatic Richard Gere and discovers the secret to his inner calm.
We all think of Richard Gere as the archetypal sexy leading man, the eternal American Gigolo, an Officer and a Gentleman. And for a couple of decades he was voted sexiest man alive repeatedly. Handsome, sophisticated, suave, impeccable ... which is the complete opposite of his character in the recent movie Norman – a small-time New York Jewish fixer, he is making connections that we don’t quite believe in, yet he refuses to be rebuffed. He wears a camel coat and a cap, and we don’t know where he lives or anything about his family, yet by the end of the movie we know Norman. Richard has become the character in a performance so deep and full, it has resonated across the US. At this time of year, there is rarely talk of Oscars, but this is being talked about as the best performance of his career, an Oscar shoo-in. Yet it’s so totally against type.
Norman moves in a different way. You can see him thinking, while Richard, you can’t really tell what he’s thinking. He is languid, confidently relaxed as he talks at his home in the countryside outside New York. He is looking out onto his fields and a walkway going up to the woods.
“This is my favourite place in the world, in the middle of nowhere,” he muses. Richard the person likes it that way, too – remote and hidden. He is mentally private, yet he speaks with open passion about his work and his philanthropy, and with great love for his dog Billie, a 15-year-old female mutt he rescued when she was a puppy.
How did Norman the character evolve? “We had a lot of time, maybe nine months, before shooting,” Richard says. “The decision-making process was a careful one. I let it sink in very slowly. I had a lot of questions because this was a unique character, so I didn’t want to make choices too soon that wouldn’t allow him to be as unique as he could be.”
He talks as if it is a very fine marinade he is creating, letting the spice and nuance seep into his role. “We worked on all levels – what he wore, what he looked like, his emotional mechanisms, psychology – everything about him was just very slow burn and then, one day, he just started showing up. He has got a unique emotional foundation, this guy, he doesn’t react to things the way we do.”
Indeed, that is why it is so disconcerting to see Richard as a character who is constantly rejected, but keeps going on, who wants to not only earn connections and make his percentage, but to make people happy.
“He does this peculiar thing,” says Richard. “Most of us, when we get hurt, the pain is too much, so we turn it into anger. Anger is much easier for us to deal with. I don’t know how he could still have blood flowing in his veins and
We all want to feel love and be wanted. Still handsome at 67, Richard Gere says he stays in shape by working on his rural property and watching his diet.
not feel angry. He gets frustrated, but we don’t see him angry. There is nothing dark inside of this guy. I called him a holy fool. There is something Chaplinesque about him, the way he is in The Tramp. He’d never want to hurt anybody, yet there were so many defeats and humiliations. Everyone has a Norman in their life and they usually try to keep them away.”
Maybe everyone has a little of Norman in themselves. Someone who is eager to please, constantly taking rebuffs, always overly available. Or is it that we all dread being that person? “Exactly,” says Richard. “We all want to feel love and be wanted when we walk into a room, but we all don’t push ourselves like Norman does. I don’t think Norman even sees it as a rejection. We would see it as a humiliation, but his emotional framework doesn’t really have that language. He is able to transform defeats and humiliations.”
It’s been years since Richard did a Hollywood blockbuster-style movie. He has charted a new terrain for himself in independent movies, starting with Arbitrage in 2012 and he is happy there. Earlier this year, The Hollywood Reporter said Richard Gere was, in fact, ostracised from the Hollywood franchise-type movie because of the China factor. As a practising Buddhist and long-time friend of the exiled Tibetan Dalai Lama, he infamously made an impassioned speech at the 1993 Oscars when he went way off script while presenting the Best Art Direction category, using the moment to draw attention to China’s “horrendous, horrendous human rights situation”.
These days, it is much more de rigueur for a presenter or award winner to use their chance with a billion people watching as a platform to promote their chosen cause, but then it was radical and Richard was one of the pioneers. Rumour has it that because China is such a big market for Hollywood films, it doesn’t want Richard involved. One story goes that a Chinese director had to turn down work with Richard as he’d been told he and his family could never leave China again if he did.
So, is it the China factor that’s caused Richard departure from mainstream Hollywood? “Not at all, not at all,” he says. “It’s just a choice. I am making the films I have always made. It’s just that they are not being made in the studios anymore. Independent movies are made cheaper and quicker.”
Does he care that he is not allowed into China?
“Yes because I would like to help the Chinese people. The Chinese policies are based on no protection or civil rights for the Chinese, as well as the Tibetans.
But it’s not just me that is not allowed into China – if you are aligned to human rights organisations or the Dalai Lama, or you are a human rights lawyer, you are not allowed in. The UN is not allowed in to monitor the situation, no one is.”
After his speech in
1993, there was a period when the Oscar organisers made it clear he was unwelcome, which may make it difficult if Norman – which opened in Australia in late May – is nominated. “That was true, but I was rehabilitated a few years ago.” says Richard. “I was invited back – they changed producers on the show.”
He sounds very nonchalant about this. In the past few years, he says, he has deliberately opted for films that were shot near home so that he could be hands on with his 17-year-old son, Homer. He shares custody of Homer with ex-wife Carey Lowell, whom he married in 2002. They split around 10 years later, but the divorce was only finalised in 2016. Before that, in the early 1990s, he was married to supermodel Cindy Crawford, none of which he is going to talk about, partly because he is private and partly because he thinks it’s too frivolous. “I made a decision that until Homer left home, I don’t want to work further away than New York and now we are just looking at colleges for him.”
I spend a lot of time with my son. He’s a busy kid.”
What kind of boy is Homer? Is he into acting and the arts or sciences? “I don’t think he has decided,” says Richard. “He has interests in many different areas and I am not pushing him. Whatever he wants, as long as he is happy. He is smart and he is looking at schools that don’t have a super strict curriculum because he wants to try different things. We spend a lot of time together. He is a busy kid. Sometimes, he has three or four hours of homework so he likes resting up, trying to forget about school before he starts up again. He splits his time living with me and his mum.”
There is a palpable “don’t go there” about his ex-wife – the only thing he says about Carey is that she left her two cats there. “I am not a cat person,” he says. “I inherited them from her.
They are a fixture now, my son loves them.”
We navigate a change of subject to his other new movie, The Dinner, a four-hander with two couples including Steve Coogan, whose impersonation of Richard in The Trip allegedly inspired the director to put them together. “I have no idea [about that],” says Richard, “but he is wonderful in it. It is a major acting performance.”
Richard, of course, is no stranger to the major acting performance and he seems to enjoy being able to spend time developing characters in a way that he couldn’t before. In Time Out Of Mind from 2014, he spent a while on street corners as a homeless person and nobody recognised him. How did that happen?
“Time Out Of Mind is one of my favourite movies,” he says. “It took me 12 years to figure out how to make it. No one wanted to make a movie about homeless people and then we had 21 days to shoot it. The concept was that I would be on the streets almost the whole movie, the camera would have long lenses and the film-makers would be invisible on rooftops, behind storefronts.
“The reality is that, in New York, no one pays attention. The first day of the shoot, I was very apprehensive, the camera was hidden in a Starbucks across the street, it was a 45-minute shoot and nobody made eye contact, nobody. They would avert their gaze thinking, ‘Homeless guy, I don’t want to deal with that.’ People are aware of you and they make a choice not to look at you.”
So the complete opposite of life as he knows it. “Well, yes. It was quite an epiphany for me
[to discover] how shallow we all are,” he says.
Perhaps that is why Mr Trump is US President (Richard was a Hillary Clinton supporter). “Everyone was in shock,” he says of the election. “I heard stories that kids came back from school and everyone was crying. The teachers, everyone.” He is also saddened, but doesn’t tend to show extremes of emotion. Richard says he gets angry, but never loses it. When we discuss his greatest extravagances, he talks about his causes – the International Campaign For Tibet and homeless charities – and that is when I see him most excited.
Richard is 67 now and is still a beautiful man, but doesn’t follow a regimen. “I have a big property and there are a lot of physical things in just living,” he says. “This environment is very healthy and I have always been careful about what I eat. I am vegetarian, I eat unfertilised eggs – nothing that has been killed.”
I wonder if there will be a Pretty Woman sequel, it is so beloved. Richard was close to Garry Marshall, its director. “He gave us that movie, he was such a generous and loving person. I never read the original script for Pretty Woman, but it was completely different, dark, edgy.”
Unlike Richard’s story, it didn’t have a happy ending – not that it’s the end for him.