Richard Gere: from ladies' man to villain

In his new film Arbitrage, which opens the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, Richard Gere plays a crooked billionaire – a role far removed form his usual characters.

Richard Gere as Robert Miller in Arbitrage. Myles Aronowitz

Richard Gere has forged a career out of making women go weak at the knees. Age has not withered him – over the years he has cast his spell, on-screen at least, over some of Hollywood's most desirable ladies: Debra Winger, Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Diane Lane, to name a few. So it's unusual to see the 63-year-old star play a dastardly character: in Arbitrage, the film opening the Abu Dhabi Film Festival tonight, Gere plays Robert Miller, a crooked billionaire hedge-fund manager whose life unravels when he is involved in a car crash that kills his mistress.

Ever since the credit crunch precipitated the current global economic malaise, bankers have become the perfect pantomime villains. Gere, however, disagrees that phrases such as hero and villain are ever truly accurate.

“I don’t believe in villains. I just don’t think there is black and white in any of us,” he says, when we meet at the San Sebastian Film Festival. “Some of us make very bad choices and some of us make better choices. But I think my job as an actor is to portray human beings, and human beings – all of us – are incredibly complex. I’ve never met a human being who wasn’t complex.”

He has achieved this goal in Arbitrage, directed by Nicholas Jarecki. While at work, Robert Miller cooks the books to hide an investment loss. His motivation for covering it up – at least what he tells himself – is to keep his employees at work. His personal life sees him cheat on his wife (Susan Sarandon) yet be extremely protective of his intelligent adult daughter (Brit Marling). He's as complicated as the world of high finance.

Even in the present crisis, the financial industry can appear alluring with its high salaries and heart-stopping make-or-break deals, but Gere doesn’t see it that way. “I don’t find the world of finance fascinating myself,” he says. “But what is more interesting is that these characters have one thing in common – they are incredibly confident. They can’t imagine that they will ever lose and there are very few people who have that sense of confidence. It’s part of being an alpha personality that it’s inconceivable that you can lose.”

It's the second time in her career that Sarandon has been cast as the wife of Gere. Previously they starred together in the 2004 romantic comedy Shall We Dance. She says that the casting of the Philadelphia-born star was pivotal in her decision to accept the project. "I thought I would do the film dependent on who they cast in the leading man role. Maybe next time I can play Richard's mistress!" says Sarandon. "He usually calls me a broad or a dame – he and Kevin Costner are the only people that call me that – it's like they are from another era."

It’s true that Gere is a throwback to a time of the all-American hero – the morally upright man with good looks and charm, something that sounds too good to be true, because usually it is. It’s why Gere’s casting seems to perfectly encapsulate the seeming moral malaise that is capitalism in contemporary America.

Gere, a supporter of President Barack Obama, says that it's revealing that the relationship between his character and the son of a former employee, Jimmy Grant, is about class rather than race. Played by the 32-year-old Red Hook Summer star Nate Parker, Grant is Miller's first port of call after his fatal car crash.

“It was an interesting thing that I realised only when we started doing press – the characters Nate and I play, we started talking and we became very good friends and I realised that Miller never treats him like a black man but treats him like a poor person,” says Gere. “Miller’s strategy of how to help him was based on how he was poor, never because he was black. There was nothing racial in it at all.”

Gere is never one to shy away from new experiences and says of coming to the Abu Dhabi Film Festival: “I’ve been to Dubai, but never to Abu Dhabi. I have absolutely no expectations of what it will be like, but I’m looking forward to going there.”