(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 31 January 2026 19:45, UK
Actors, at least well-known ones who have a body of work behind them, don’t have to beg and plead for roles. They might not get them, but it’s never a good look for a star to be caught pleading. Richard Gere didn’t care, though, even if his petition ultimately fell on deaf ears.
He may not be as big as he used to be, but Gere is still a household name. He was one of his era’s biggest stars and most popular leading men, but once the shine started to come off his star, he never seemed able to buffer it back into the sparkling condition it was once, although there was a reason for that.
The Golden Globe winner claimed that his continually outspoken support for Tibet had seen him blacklisted in many industry circles, and you can see why. A line can definitely be drawn between the halcyon days of Pretty Woman, An Officer and a Gentleman, and Primal Fear, and recent roles in Oh, Canada, Three Christs, and The Dinner, with his public backing of Tibet wedged right in the middle.
Those beliefs also saw him banned from attending the Oscars for 20 years, and in a town where you can easily weather the storm of being accused of shoving a gerbil up your arse for sexual gratification, speaking out on human rights violations on the other side of the world is obviously a bigger no-no.
Gere hasn’t completely fallen off the map, but he isn’t being offered the same calibre of parts as in his heyday. Things reached a head when he decided that the easiest way to outline his undying love for a 1994 Hindi-language classic was to throw himself at the feet of its director, Shekhar Kapur.
“After seeing Bandit Queen, I went down on my knees, pleading, ‘Shekharji, please let me do a film with you,’” he told The Daily Eye, with his tongue planted ever so slightly in cheek. “But he has been casting me off. He just goes, ‘Pooh’, at me, as if I was a mendicant, a beggar on the street.”
That’s not completely true, but neither is it wildly inaccurate. Kapur, who also helmed Cate Blanchett’s star-making Elizabeth and The Four Feathers, was planning to make a picture with Gere at one point in his career, but when those plans vanished in a puff of smoke, they never entered each other’s creative orbit again.
In the mid-2000s, it was announced that Kapur would be directing a movie about Buddha. Gere, as one of cinema’s most high-profile Buddhists, was involved in the production during the early stages, assisting with research and being eyed to play a major role onscreen. That didn’t happen, and he clearly didn’t get over it.
It was the one that got away, and you can tell that Gere was devastated to miss out on the chance to team up with Kapur when, years later, he quipped that he would still be willing to do anything to make it happen.
Related Topics
