Festival: Richard Gere on aging as an actor

Hollywood star Richard Gere describes aging as an actor as a strange experience. “When you see yourself in the film, you follow your whole life,” said the 74-year-old on Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival. “When I receive an award at a film festival and they show a compilation of my films, it’s a really bizarre experience to see your life in front of you in two minutes. So I see the characters, but I also see myself. I was them Person who pretended to be this character It’s a very strange thing to be an actor.”

Gere plays the leading role in the competition film “Oh, Canada” by Paul Schrader. The literary adaptation is about a documentary filmmaker suffering from cancer who gives an interview about his life before his death. Gere portrays Leonard Fife, a director of political documentaries. In the interview he wants to reveal to his wife Emma (Uma Thurman) things from his past that he was never able to tell her. In the drama, Gere was partly made older through make-up.

Gere’s father recently died at the age of 101. In Cannes, the actor said he processed his feelings after this death while making the film. Seeing himself as an older version of himself alienated him and also made him think of his father. “I wanted to pay homage to my father as much as possible. I look like my father too. And it was crazy when we went through the process of aging in the film, how much I saw myself in a few years, what I would look like – if “I expect I’ll live to be as old as my father. That’s a very strange thing.”

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