For a person who has always felt insecure—a fact she is reluctant to acknowledge because she knows that pretty people don’t get much sympathy for their soft spots—she has never been more comfortable looking at herself in the mirror. Gerber and Gere watched the pilot of The Shards together: fun for her, harrowing for him. (“I can’t watch myself,” he says. “It’s a whole thing.”) They have talked about what to expect from a knives-out viewing public that might think, Here is peak nepo baby.
“I’ve only ever been a nepo baby, and I’ve only ever benefited in my career from it,” Gerber says. “But I also find myself doing it to other nepo babies, thinking, like, Okay, show me why you deserve this job. I said to Homer—because the concept is daunting to him, having lived as an adult so far without that perception, whereas I sort of went through it when I wasn’t fully sentient—I said to him, ‘Homer, unfortunately with this show, it’s not like you’re just any unknown actor and people will judge you as an unknown actor. But what that’s done for me is make me want to work harder.’ ”
Gere has a stutter, which he has learned to mask following years of speech therapy in middle school and a decade of practice since then. In that premonitory moment when he feels he is about to get stuck on a word, he pivots. “What I do is, I’ll change the word at the last minute,” he explains, “so if I’m going to stutter on rock, I’ll switch it to stone. I’m constantly playing a game of cat and mouse with my own mind.” Despite the wish for a quiet life, for the monastery or the mountaintop, like Robert Mallory, Gere seems to have a talent for finding himself in the center of the image. He would never call it star quality, though others might.
“I’m a very self-critical guy who would like to believe that my career’s going well for all the wrong reasons,” he says. “But the more success I have, the harder it becomes to believe that. I think doubting yourself a little bit is very healthy, no matter how good you are. At anything. You should always be a little nervous if you’re doing something worthwhile.”
In this story: hair, Guido Palau; makeup, Pat McGrath; manicurist, Jin Soon Choi; tailor, Carol Ai at Carol Ai Studio Tailors.
Produced by PRODn.
