Richard Gere admits to screwing up his career – he had to ‘crawl a little bit’ to get scripts

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The A-list actor who is best knows for his roles in Pretty Woman and An Officer and a Gentleman fell in love with acting when he first interacted with the stage while at high school when he composed several amateur musical shows. However, it took quite some time before Richard Gere realized acting and being on stage was his thing.

After he dropped from university in order to pursue a career in acting, he experienced a few disastrous shows and decided to move “across the pond” to London, England where he got the role of Danny Zuko in the musical Grease in London.

When the musical was set up in New York, Gere made the decision to return to the States where he found work on Broadway.

He got his breakthrough role in the thriller Looking for Mr. Goodbar, starring alongside Diane Keaton, in the year 1977. A year later, Gere landed a starring role in Days of Heaven, and in 1980, he got the title role in American Gigolo.

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When he starred in one of the best romcoms ever filmed, Pretty Woman, Gere cemented his place in Hollywood. According to him, it was his co-star Julia Roberts who convinced him to take the role.

“To be honest, I didn’t know if I was doing this movie yet. She’s across the desk, we’re getting to know each other, we’re flirty-flirty, nice-nice,” Gere told Smooth Radio in 2015.

“And [director Garry Marshall] calls up and it’s kind of like, ‘How’s it going?’ And I’m going, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and she takes a piece of paper. She turns it around, and she pushes it to me. It said, ‘Please say yes.’ It was so sweet. And I was like [miming talking on the phone], ‘I just said yes.’”

LOS ANGELES – CIRCA 1986–Eddie Jillette (Richard Gere) travels into the Louisiana Bayou to find Losado the man who killed his partner. (Photo by Images/Getty Images)

Before landing a prominent role, Gere felt like he had screwed up his career.

“Pretty Woman is something I never would have done. Neither is An Officer and a Gentleman. I had no interest in these scripts whatsoever,” Gere said in a 1993 interview with Movieline magazine. “It was the same person knocking my door down on both of them, Jeffrey Katzenberg, first at Paramount, then at Disney, who was one of my first friends out here and still is. At the point of Pretty Woman, I had been kind of out of things for a while. I consciously [had] just said, ‘Going off to do other things’ and I fucked up my career to the point where [people weren’t saying], ‘Well, let’s get Gere to do that.’”

He continued, “I had to crawl a little bit to get scripts. Doing Internal Affairs, for instance, was a very difficult decision for me to make because, potentially, that could have been such a piece of shit.

“One thing lead to another and I started to see something I could bring to this,” Richard Gere recalled about the time when he considered Pretty Woman. “But it was a fairly mercantile decision, not a soul decision. Made the movie, had a great time making the movie and, probably because of the lack of pressure to do something important, I was able to explore other things in myself and as a man, too. I think I found a much freer way of working in that film, which I’ve used ever since.”