Richard Gere Says He Took American Gigolo Role Due To Gay Subtext

Back in the early 1980s, it was generally seen as career suicide to ‘play gay’, but that didn’t mean stars weren’t interested in roles with a bit of homoerotic subtext. That seems to be true of Richard Gere, who’s told EW that one of the reasons he chose to star in American Gigolo was because of its gay themes.

In an interview that takes in his thought on many of his most popular films, he says, “Paul [Schrader, the film’s writer and director] came to see me in Malibu and said, ‘You’ve got to say yes to this by tomorrow at the latest.’ I read it and I thought, ‘This is a character I don’t know very well. I don’t own a suit. He speaks languages; I don’t speak any languages. There’s kind of a gay thing that’s flirting through it and I didn’t know the gay community at all.’ I wanted to immerse myself in all of that and I had literally two weeks. So I just dove in. If I recall, [the nudity] wasn’t in the script. It was just in the natural process of making the movie. I certainly felt vulnerable, but I think it’s different for men than women.”

The reason Gere only had two weeks is that John Travolta dropped out shortly before shooting was set to begin (perhaps even back then he was trying to avoid the gay rumours that have followed him around for decades). Indeed Gere has a lot to thank Travolta for, as it was the Grease star dropping out of American Gigolo, Days Of Heaven and An Officer And A Gentleman that essentially handed Richard his career.

American Gigolo is about a man who makes his money as an escort to wealthy older women, but whose life gets complicated when one of his clients is murdered. The same year as Gigolo was released, Gere took to the Broadway stage in the play Bent, about gay people in a Nazi concentration camp, which at the time was seen as a brave move for a young actor of the verge of stardom.