(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Tue 30 September 2025 18:15, UK
Having been a practising Buddhist since the late 1970s, Richard Gere should be ranked among the least likely actors to get involved in a physical altercation on set, but that doesn’t make it impossible for the red mist to descend on occasion.
He’d already had a notable run-in with a fellow future star when he was fired from The Lords of Flatbush after a lunchtime mishap involving chicken grease and mustard saw him fighting with Sylvester Stallone, igniting a feud between them that lasted for years and even led the Rocky and Rambo legend to hint that Gere holds him responsible for starting the infamous gerbil rumour.
That was far from the last time he’d run afoul of a colleague, with Gere’s Zen-like approach to life not always reflected in his on-set behaviour. He clashed with Bruce Willis when they worked together on The Jackal, and he didn’t get along with Debra Winger on the set of An Officer and a Gentleman either.
She wasn’t even the only cast member he pissed off while shooting Taylor Hackford’s classic romantic drama, with the leading man finding himself so in the zone ahead of a staged brawl that he booted Louis Gossett Jr for real, which understandably caused his scene partner to storm off the set in a furious rage.
“I was learning the routines of what I had to do, and I was getting very good at that,” he told Brad Balfour. “I was proud of that. That’s all I could do, but I was learning the routines. But Lou was also learning karate as he was in this. But for some reason, he wasn’t able to get the routines. It just wasn’t happening.”
When the time came for their first fight, Gere was ready. “When we came to shoot the scene, I was so filled with the routines and I had it down and everything,” he explained. “We started shooting the scene, and he was struggling with it. I was getting pissed off.” Taking the unprofessional approach, the star signalled his discontent by kicking Gossett Jr full force.
“I hit him in the gut. He said, ‘OK, that’s it. I’m out of here’, and he left. And rightly so,” he added. “I had no right doing that to him. And he left, and he was serious, he wasn’t coming back.” Obviously, he did come back, and he even won an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his troubles, but he wasn’t exactly desperate to go toe-to-toe with Gere again to finish the scene.
With Gossett standing at an imposing six-foot-four, Hackford had to make some desperate calls to casting agencies to find a suitable stand-in. He didn’t return to the Officer and a Gentleman set for another two days, but in the meantime, Gere confessed that “we shot a lot of that sequence with a double” in his co-star’s absence, “but you can’t tell.”
In the end, Gere tried to be the bigger man, taking “full credit for having messed up,” and audiences probably didn’t even notice that a lot of their confrontation was captured while Gossett Jr wasn’t even there, and they definitely didn’t know that Gere’s wayward feet were the reason why.
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