Richard Gere has claimed his role opposite Julia Roberts in iconic 90s rom-com Pretty Woman was ‘criminally underwritten’.
The Hollywood icon, 75, boasts an impressive list of credits throughout his decades-long career, including An Officer and a Gentleman and American Gigolo.
However, his status as a heart-throb and in-demand leading man was cemented the following decade when he was paired with Roberts, 56, in the 1990 Garry Marshall-directed flick.
Pretty Woman is considered an absolute classic of its genre, starring Roberts as escort Vivian, who is hired by rich businessman Edward (Gere) to accompany him to a few social events, where the pair develop a real connection.
However, Gere was not exactly struck by the way Edward was written, he admitted during a talk at Venice Film Festival.
The actor told the audience that he ‘was playing a character that was almost criminally underwritten’.
‘It was basically a suit and a good haircut,’ he quipped.
Gere had reacted to a clip of the famous steamy piano scene he shared with Notting Hill actress Roberts, where he undresses her and places her on top of the instrument, running his hands along her body, in the ballroom of the swanky Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
‘No chemistry,’ he laughed while blushing. ‘I mean, this actor and this actress obviously had no chemistry between them.’
‘I haven’t seen that in a long time, too. It was a sexy scene,’ he added.
The Chicago star reflected on the scene being improvised, with the idea for the scene coming from director Marshall asking him to imagine what his character would do while staying at the hotel.
‘This was never in the script… We didn’t know how we would use it later. It ended up being integral to the film.’
Gere said he ‘just started playing something moody that was about this character’s interior life’ but praised the scene for how it did add depth to the plot because Vivian was ‘able to see him in a completely different way’.
‘There was a mysterious yearning and maybe a damaged quality to this guy that she didn’t know,’ he suggested.
Pretty Woman was a huge hit, grossing over $463million on a budget of reportedly around $14m.
Gere and Roberts went on to team up again for another rom-com, 1999’s Runaway Bride, which was also helmed by Marshall and also featured Pretty Woman co-star Héctor Elizondo.
Despite less favourable reviews, it was still another success for the pairing, with the screwball-style rom-com banking $309.5m at the global box office from a $70m budget.
In Gere’s upcoming film Oh Canada – which premiered at Cannes – he is utterly transformed to play an 81-year-old terminally ill and tormented documentary filmmaker and writer who agrees to have the final testament of his life filmed by his former students.
The film’s story reveals that Leonard Fife (Gere, and played by Jacob Elordi in flashbacks) fled to Canada from the US to avoid the Vietnam War draft.
Gere described his big transformation – including thinning hair and bruised skin – as ‘freaky’ at the Cannes press conference for Oh, Canada, given how much it made him look like his late father, Homer, who died aged 100 in March 2023.
‘I wanted to embrace as much as I could of my father,’ he told and other press in May.
‘I do look like my father too – it was kind of freaky when we were going through the process of ageing in the film, how much I saw myself, so many years from now, what I was going to look like then, assuming that I live to be as old as my father.’
‘It’s a very odd thing,’ he added.
The Hollywood star is also set to appear in The Making Of opposite Diane Keaton and Blake Lively, where long-married filmmakers cast overemotional actors to portray their younger selves in the story of their romance. But by the time shooting begins, their fabled marriage is unravelling.
Gere’s breakthrough role was in 1977’s Looking for Mr Goodbar.