Richard Gere Looks Back on ‘Pretty Woman’

Actor Richard Gere has graced screens for 51 years, but if attendees of the Venice Film Festival are any indication, his most beloved role is as Edward Lewis, the strictly transactional businessman warmed up by effervescent sex worker Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) in Pretty Woman. At a masterclass event featuring Gere’s life work on Sunday, the audience broke into its loudest applause when the 1990 rom-com was introduced, spurring the actor to look back on the 34-year-old film.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, “I mean, no chemistry,” Gere sarcastically blurted when the movie’s piano scene—in which Gere lifts Roberts onto the instrument and into a clinch—appeared on the screen at the Venezia Tennis Club. “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, sexy scene,” he continued.

Richard Gere said that bit of the film was a spur-of-the-moment affair, Variety reports. “This was never in the script,” he said. “We didn’t know how we would use it later. It ended up being integral to the film.”

The scene came about when director Garry Marshall “said to me, ‘What do you do late at night in a hotel?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m usually jet lagged, [that] would be the time I’m in a hotel. So I’m up all night and usually there’s a ballroom somewhere or a bar, and I’ll find a piano, and I’ll play the piano.’”

Marshall told Gere, “Well, let’s do something with that,” he recalled. “So we just basically improvised this scene, and he said: ‘Play something moody.’ I just started playing something moody that was this character’s interior life.”

That moment helped move the romance forward, Gere said, as it allowed Vivian to understand Edward “in a completely different way. There was a mysterious yearning and maybe a damaged quality to this guy that she didn’t know.”

According to Gere, matters like Edward’s internal life and damaged quality weren’t in the script, either. He “was playing a character that was almost criminally underwritten. It was basically a suit and a good haircut,” Gere said.

This isn’t the first time Gere has expressed dissatisfaction with the role. In fact, he spoke far more harshly about the movie in 2012, when he said Pretty Woman is “my least favorite thing.”

The movie made hard-hitting businessmen like Edward “seem dashing, which was so wrong. Thankfully, today, we are all more skeptical of those guys.” A fair assessment!

“People ask me about [that film], but I’ve forgotten it,” Gere said in that 2012 interview. “That was a silly romantic comedy.” (Though that wasn’t always the intention, as everyone knows.)

Perhaps the 12 years since that conversation have softened Gere, who celebrated his 75th birthday on Saturday. “We were having fun making this little tiny movie,” he said today. “We didn’t know if anyone would ever see this little tiny movie. No one would ever pay attention to this little tiny movie.”