‘Homeless’ Richard Gere Not Recognized by New Yorkers

Actor Richard Gere tells People Magazine that he was out on the streets of New York in character for his new movie “Time Out of Mind” more than 40 minutes and no one even made eye contact with him, let alone recognized him.

He said if he had been out there as himself, he “wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds,” presumably before someone recognized him and/or asked him for his autograph. “It was just I wasn’t the movie star and people’s projections on what they saw from the body language and where I was in the street filled in these spaces with an erroneous story,” he said.

This does seem like an odd tale, like if he was out there being filmed, didn’t they have the cameras rolling somewhere? Well, this movie was made last year and People had a very similar article on it then that talked about the same thing but included Kyra Sedgwick. They must be recycling the article to draw attention to the film.

There’s also a trivia item on IMDB connected to the film that says, during filming, a French tourist gave Gere some leftover pizza while he was in full costume and later read about that in the news. LOL. A lot of people these days probably wouldn’t recognize Gere if they fell over him anyway. He was the answer to a Jeopardy! clue 7 years ago and no one knew it. (In 2008 Diane Lane spent some “Nights in Rodanthe” with Paul, played by this leading man).

Commendably, Richard Gere does advocate for the homeless in real life. “Last week I was in Philadelphia,” he tells The Daily News, “where there’s an interesting movement going on: Local businesses are taking it upon themselves to help solve the homeless crisis. It’s a mix of private citizens and government working together. We should find something like that in New York.”