‘ACTING IS LIKE HIGH FINANCE It often involves fraud’
You were gorgeous then,’ I tell Richard Gere. He looks crossly over his glasses. ‘Were?’ he says. ‘Were – and are.’ ‘Thank you,’ he says, mollified. He looks back at a 40-year-old photograph of himself on my phone. In the photo, it’s June 1973 and Richard Gere is Danny Zuko, hair-slicked hottie bad boy of Grease, the role he played for six months at the New London Theatre, Drury Lane. It’s decades before Gere started working that distinguished grey mane that serves him so well nowadays.
Long before he became the highest-paid lover in Beverly Hills (in American Gigolo). Before he made Debra Winger and a good percentage of cinema audiences come over all unnecessary in navy whites (in An O cer And A Gentleman).
Before he saved Julia Roberts from a life of prostitution (Pretty Woman). Before he was married to Carey Lowell, then Carey Loewell. Before Daniel Day-Lewis beat him to the 2013 Best Actor Golden Globe; and certainly before he became a Buddhist. In the Zuko picture, Gere is draped over a microphone with dangerous eyebrows, razored sideburns and a quiff only a fool wouldn’t covet. He looks as if he’s crooning something really raunchy. Forget John Travolta, who played Zuko in the 1978 movie.
Does he still have that killer leather jacket? ‘Nah. Probably couldn’t even fit into it now.’ He looks back at the picture and smiles wistfully, nostalgically. ‘Oh how funny! I gotta send this to my son. Will you send it to me?’
So what does he remember of London 40 years ago?
‘I don’t think I’d been out of the US and this job happened and it was one of those moments where you think: “I’m starting the next part of my life somehow”.’
‘We did previews in Chichester and I remember the Triumph motorcycle factory was there and I saved up enough to buy a Triumph motorcycle.
‘I was a kid – 23? I had my Triumph motorcycle and London and the jacket and it’s all new to me. I’m on top of the world. Grease was a big hit. It was one of those moments.’ Gere says he’s loved to work in England ever since. He filmed John Schlesinger’s Yanks in Twickenham and Yorkshire. He played lavishly bearded King David in Bruce Beresford’s biblical epic that, for some doubtless plausible reason, was shot here. He also shot some scenes of the adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul, opposite Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins, in England.
‘I always felt at home here.’
And now he is back in this rain-soaked dime of a country in glummer circumstances. He’s here to do the press for his new movie. We’re in a sixth-floor suite at Claridge’s, but what’s that incessant metallic noise? Gere tapping spoon against teacup. He’s taut, restless. Like any intelligent life form, he finds these junkets irksome. The same hacks with the same lame questions in different hotels. ‘I do the movie for free, but this I get paid for,’ he says grimly. ‘Only three hours to go.’
In Arbitrage, he plays Robert Miller, a hedge-fund magnate whose world falls apart on his 60th birthday. Miller’s $413m in the hole, facing 1,000 years in jail for fraud and, worst of all, he just blew up a car wreck containing his mistress’s corpse so he doesn’t get fingered for infidelity. But here’s the twist: despite the fact that he’s cheating on adorable Susan Sarandon with uninteresting Laetitia Casta, we can’t bring ourselves to hate him.
Robert Miller is no boo-hiss Wall Street git à la Gordon Gekko. ‘To tell the truth I can’t remember anything about Gordon Gekko apart from him saying: “Greed is good”.’ No one can, but his surname suggests he’s bad. ‘Yeah, reptilian. This is the anti-reptilian, probably.’
The art of deception: Richard with screen wife Susan Sarandon in Arbitrage
Gere has been getting heat from friends who resent him playing a billionaire hoodlum as unreptilian, perhaps even human. But he’s unrepentant. ‘It’s very easy to hate these guys. They’re the punching bag, but it would be too easy to play him that way – it wouldn’t be interesting. Philosophically we enable those guys. As much as we hate them, we hate ourselves because we gave them the rope to hang ourselves with.’
So we should stop bashing bankers because they’re just projections of what disgusts us about ourselves? ‘It takes our sense of responsibility out of the picture. We don’t have to take responsibility because they are so bad. The fact is they are us and we’re so complicit in the process.’
This character is the flipside to the corporate raider he played in Pretty Woman. ‘That was a silly romantic comedy. You never saw him as a bad guy.’
Our feelings towards Miller, by contrast, are rarely so straightforwardly sympathetic. We’re conflicted – we’re revolted by and implicated in his crimes. Miller, Gere claims, is today’s everyman.
‘He is educated, has possibilities, has money, has all the things you’re supposed to want, but there is something bereft about life choices and moral responsibility.’
This is what lured the 63-year-old Gere back to play his most substantial role in years. The taut script and its topical message overcame his doubts about working with first-time director Nicholas Jarecki, an NY film-school graduate and, more importantly, son of two Wall Street traders. ‘Nick knows this world very well. You can see he’s not bluffing it.
All quiffed up as Danny Zuko in Grease
‘There is a diary that was supposedly written in Ancient Egypt and there was some controversy about whether it was real, and one expert said it’s absolutely not. Why not? Because in the diary they’re always talking about camels.
‘Someone who has camels in their lives constantly doesn’t talk a lot about camels. They don’t even see them. It’s the same with this. If this were a bad TV movie, it would be pointing fingers at the obvious. But venality is part of the texture of the movie, not upfront.’
Camels? What Gere means is that Arbitrage is a thriller that gives us an insider’s perspective rather than being, as Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street surely was, an outsider’s pantomimic rant. And yet, because Gere brings baggage to the film, some decline to take it seriously.
When the lights went down at the press screening for Arbitrage, a woman behind me shouted: ‘Go on then Richard, show us your gear!’ Classy. In the old days she would have had her press card shredded in front of her for a stunt like that.
Such reactions are a shame, because this is Gere’s best work for a while.
But was his Buddhism relevant to his decision to take this role? Did he want to play Miller because he’s destroyed by the very thing he should renounce: desire? Gere laughs. ‘It’s relevant to everything I do. We were talking about camels. Buddhism is the camel of my life. It’s there, everywhere.
‘I don’t think you have to be Buddhist to get it, quite honestly. I’m more interested in secular ethics, about what we all have in common. What is good? What is happiness? What is our duty to the community? What is our duty to ourselves?’
At the start of the film, it’s Miller’s 60th birthday party and he makes a speech before his extended family: ‘It’s taken me 60 years to realise what’s important – it’s you guys.’ The ensuing 100 minutes expose that lie. ‘He’s a liar, a huckster, a conman and a fraud. I recognise that. Acting is a fraud – but if you don’t fill it with truth, it has no power. I have to believe the lie. He does the same thing.’
But he betrays everything he affects to hold dear? ‘Look at Clinton. Same thing. He betrayed his wife, betrayed his child, betrayed his friends.’
Gere clearly has a thing about Bill Clinton. And not a good one.
‘Bill Clinton says this in his book. “I never grew up. I didn’t go to the next step.” It’s like “I’m feeling it so it must be right. I identify with it, give myself to it.”’
He’s talking about Clinton’s sexual disgrace?
‘Yeah. There’s a boyish quality to it. I’m not sure that’s something we want in our leaders. One would think an adult could harness that energy and use it in a constructive, meaningful way. But the Millers and the Clintons of this world do not.’
So when did Gere take that step into maturity? He’s campaigned for human rights in Tibet, for ecological causes and Aids awareness, and supports Survival International, which is dedicated to protecting the rights and lands of tribal peoples.
Yes, he was involved in an obscenity rumpus after he kissed Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty in 2007, but the free-kissing Hollywood interloper could, a judge later ruled, come to India whenever he wanted.
‘I haven’t quite got there myself,’ says Gere of maturity.
‘Hope you never will,’ chips in his PR minder, saucily.
Gere laughs: ‘You don’t want to lose that energy but there’s an unseemliness at a certain age when you’re run by it, when you’re not in control, that’s really kind of foul.’
Does he remember meditating in the hit cartoon series The Simpsons, with Lenny and Carl at the Springfield Buddhist Temple? Gere giggles. ‘That was fun, I did it for my stepdaughter. I thought if she loves me now, she’s really going to love me after seeing me in The Simpsons.’
And it was funny. ‘Who’s Buddha?’ asked Lenny. ‘It’s a good thing Buddhism teaches freedom from desire,’ snaps Gere, ‘’cause I’ve got the desire to kick your ass.’
One question remains. When Carl asks if he did all those sit-ups in An Officer And A Gentleman, Gere replies that he just did one and they repeated it thousands of times. What really happened?
‘We were doing push-ups. And we were all in great shape. So we did one take – 40, 50, 100 push-ups. Still pumping away. OK, cut. Take two. And we look at each other – exhausted, incredulous. So we get pumping again: 40, 50. Cut! We gotta do it again. A light problem.
‘By the fourth take we decide when the cameras roll we’ll start at 92, 93, 94. And that’s what you see in the movie.’ So what we see is a con?
‘Acting is like high finance – it often involves fraud.’
Is that a job for a grown-up Buddhist?
‘I enjoy my job. I have the best job in the world. I have no doubt in my mind I have the best job in the world.’
Maybe when Gere’s maturation process is complete, he’ll feel otherwise.
Arbitrage is on general release now.
Long before he became the highest-paid lover in Beverly Hills (in American Gigolo). Before he made Debra Winger and a good percentage of cinema audiences come over all unnecessary in navy whites (in An O cer And A Gentleman).
Before he saved Julia Roberts from a life of prostitution (Pretty Woman). Before he was married to Carey Lowell, then Carey Loewell. Before Daniel Day-Lewis beat him to the 2013 Best Actor Golden Globe; and certainly before he became a Buddhist. In the Zuko picture, Gere is draped over a microphone with dangerous eyebrows, razored sideburns and a quiff only a fool wouldn’t covet. He looks as if he’s crooning something really raunchy. Forget John Travolta, who played Zuko in the 1978 movie.
Does he still have that killer leather jacket? ‘Nah. Probably couldn’t even fit into it now.’ He looks back at the picture and smiles wistfully, nostalgically. ‘Oh how funny! I gotta send this to my son. Will you send it to me?’
So what does he remember of London 40 years ago?
‘I don’t think I’d been out of the US and this job happened and it was one of those moments where you think: “I’m starting the next part of my life somehow”.’
‘We did previews in Chichester and I remember the Triumph motorcycle factory was there and I saved up enough to buy a Triumph motorcycle.
‘I was a kid – 23? I had my Triumph motorcycle and London and the jacket and it’s all new to me. I’m on top of the world. Grease was a big hit. It was one of those moments.’ Gere says he’s loved to work in England ever since. He filmed John Schlesinger’s Yanks in Twickenham and Yorkshire. He played lavishly bearded King David in Bruce Beresford’s biblical epic that, for some doubtless plausible reason, was shot here. He also shot some scenes of the adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul, opposite Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins, in England.
‘I always felt at home here.’
And now he is back in this rain-soaked dime of a country in glummer circumstances. He’s here to do the press for his new movie. We’re in a sixth-floor suite at Claridge’s, but what’s that incessant metallic noise? Gere tapping spoon against teacup. He’s taut, restless. Like any intelligent life form, he finds these junkets irksome. The same hacks with the same lame questions in different hotels. ‘I do the movie for free, but this I get paid for,’ he says grimly. ‘Only three hours to go.’
In Arbitrage, he plays Robert Miller, a hedge-fund magnate whose world falls apart on his 60th birthday. Miller’s $413m in the hole, facing 1,000 years in jail for fraud and, worst of all, he just blew up a car wreck containing his mistress’s corpse so he doesn’t get fingered for infidelity. But here’s the twist: despite the fact that he’s cheating on adorable Susan Sarandon with uninteresting Laetitia Casta, we can’t bring ourselves to hate him.
Robert Miller is no boo-hiss Wall Street git à la Gordon Gekko. ‘To tell the truth I can’t remember anything about Gordon Gekko apart from him saying: “Greed is good”.’ No one can, but his surname suggests he’s bad. ‘Yeah, reptilian. This is the anti-reptilian, probably.’
The art of deception: Richard with screen wife Susan Sarandon in ArbitrageGere has been getting heat from friends who resent him playing a billionaire hoodlum as unreptilian, perhaps even human. But he’s unrepentant. ‘It’s very easy to hate these guys. They’re the punching bag, but it would be too easy to play him that way – it wouldn’t be interesting. Philosophically we enable those guys. As much as we hate them, we hate ourselves because we gave them the rope to hang ourselves with.’
So we should stop bashing bankers because they’re just projections of what disgusts us about ourselves? ‘It takes our sense of responsibility out of the picture. We don’t have to take responsibility because they are so bad. The fact is they are us and we’re so complicit in the process.’
This character is the flipside to the corporate raider he played in Pretty Woman. ‘That was a silly romantic comedy. You never saw him as a bad guy.’
Our feelings towards Miller, by contrast, are rarely so straightforwardly sympathetic. We’re conflicted – we’re revolted by and implicated in his crimes. Miller, Gere claims, is today’s everyman.
‘He is educated, has possibilities, has money, has all the things you’re supposed to want, but there is something bereft about life choices and moral responsibility.’
This is what lured the 63-year-old Gere back to play his most substantial role in years. The taut script and its topical message overcame his doubts about working with first-time director Nicholas Jarecki, an NY film-school graduate and, more importantly, son of two Wall Street traders. ‘Nick knows this world very well. You can see he’s not bluffing it.
All quiffed up as Danny Zuko in Grease‘There is a diary that was supposedly written in Ancient Egypt and there was some controversy about whether it was real, and one expert said it’s absolutely not. Why not? Because in the diary they’re always talking about camels.
‘Someone who has camels in their lives constantly doesn’t talk a lot about camels. They don’t even see them. It’s the same with this. If this were a bad TV movie, it would be pointing fingers at the obvious. But venality is part of the texture of the movie, not upfront.’
Camels? What Gere means is that Arbitrage is a thriller that gives us an insider’s perspective rather than being, as Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street surely was, an outsider’s pantomimic rant. And yet, because Gere brings baggage to the film, some decline to take it seriously.
When the lights went down at the press screening for Arbitrage, a woman behind me shouted: ‘Go on then Richard, show us your gear!’ Classy. In the old days she would have had her press card shredded in front of her for a stunt like that.
Such reactions are a shame, because this is Gere’s best work for a while.
But was his Buddhism relevant to his decision to take this role? Did he want to play Miller because he’s destroyed by the very thing he should renounce: desire? Gere laughs. ‘It’s relevant to everything I do. We were talking about camels. Buddhism is the camel of my life. It’s there, everywhere.
‘I don’t think you have to be Buddhist to get it, quite honestly. I’m more interested in secular ethics, about what we all have in common. What is good? What is happiness? What is our duty to the community? What is our duty to ourselves?’
At the start of the film, it’s Miller’s 60th birthday party and he makes a speech before his extended family: ‘It’s taken me 60 years to realise what’s important – it’s you guys.’ The ensuing 100 minutes expose that lie. ‘He’s a liar, a huckster, a conman and a fraud. I recognise that. Acting is a fraud – but if you don’t fill it with truth, it has no power. I have to believe the lie. He does the same thing.’
But he betrays everything he affects to hold dear? ‘Look at Clinton. Same thing. He betrayed his wife, betrayed his child, betrayed his friends.’
Gere clearly has a thing about Bill Clinton. And not a good one.
‘Bill Clinton says this in his book. “I never grew up. I didn’t go to the next step.” It’s like “I’m feeling it so it must be right. I identify with it, give myself to it.”’
He’s talking about Clinton’s sexual disgrace?
‘Yeah. There’s a boyish quality to it. I’m not sure that’s something we want in our leaders. One would think an adult could harness that energy and use it in a constructive, meaningful way. But the Millers and the Clintons of this world do not.’
So when did Gere take that step into maturity? He’s campaigned for human rights in Tibet, for ecological causes and Aids awareness, and supports Survival International, which is dedicated to protecting the rights and lands of tribal peoples.
Yes, he was involved in an obscenity rumpus after he kissed Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty in 2007, but the free-kissing Hollywood interloper could, a judge later ruled, come to India whenever he wanted.
‘I haven’t quite got there myself,’ says Gere of maturity.
‘Hope you never will,’ chips in his PR minder, saucily.
Gere laughs: ‘You don’t want to lose that energy but there’s an unseemliness at a certain age when you’re run by it, when you’re not in control, that’s really kind of foul.’
Does he remember meditating in the hit cartoon series The Simpsons, with Lenny and Carl at the Springfield Buddhist Temple? Gere giggles. ‘That was fun, I did it for my stepdaughter. I thought if she loves me now, she’s really going to love me after seeing me in The Simpsons.’
And it was funny. ‘Who’s Buddha?’ asked Lenny. ‘It’s a good thing Buddhism teaches freedom from desire,’ snaps Gere, ‘’cause I’ve got the desire to kick your ass.’
One question remains. When Carl asks if he did all those sit-ups in An Officer And A Gentleman, Gere replies that he just did one and they repeated it thousands of times. What really happened?
‘We were doing push-ups. And we were all in great shape. So we did one take – 40, 50, 100 push-ups. Still pumping away. OK, cut. Take two. And we look at each other – exhausted, incredulous. So we get pumping again: 40, 50. Cut! We gotta do it again. A light problem.
‘By the fourth take we decide when the cameras roll we’ll start at 92, 93, 94. And that’s what you see in the movie.’ So what we see is a con?
‘Acting is like high finance – it often involves fraud.’
Is that a job for a grown-up Buddhist?
‘I enjoy my job. I have the best job in the world. I have no doubt in my mind I have the best job in the world.’
Maybe when Gere’s maturation process is complete, he’ll feel otherwise.
Arbitrage is on general release now.