Richard Gere thinks the script for Pretty Woman left a lot to be desired when it came to his character, millionaire playboy Edward Lewis.
While speaking during a masterclass at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday, the leading man joked that his part in the Garry Marshall-directed picture was “almost criminally underwritten”.
“It was basically a suit and a good haircut,” he laughed in a clip shared by The Hollywood Reporter’s Chris Gardner.
To help bring his character to life, Richard revealed how he and the director ended up improvising one of Pretty Woman’s most pivotal scenes: a steamy sequence where Lewis plays the piano for Julia Roberts’ spirited sex worker character, Vivian, before things get hot and heavy between the two.
After the clip rolled during the masterclass, the star smirked and said: “This actor and this actress obviously had no chemistry between them.”
Richard then shared how the scene was “never in the script” but “ended up being integral to the film.”
“Garry said to me, ‘What do you do late at night in a hotel?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m usually jet lagged, [that] would be the time I’m in a hotel. So I’m up all night and usually there’s a ballroom somewhere or a bar, and I’ll find a piano and I’ll play the piano’,” he recalled.
“He said, ‘Well, let’s do something with that.’ So we just basically improvised this scene, and he said, ‘Play something moody.’ I just started playing something moody that was this character’s interior life.”
Unveiling Lewis’ soft side let Julia’s character see him “in a completely different way,” the Unfaithful actor explained.
“There was a mysterious yearning and maybe a damaged quality to this guy that she didn’t know.”
While Pretty Woman was a smash hit, grossing a reported $463.4 million worldwide, Richard remembered the project more modestly.
“We were having fun making this,” he told his audience in Venice. “The whole time we made the movie, we didn’t know if anyone would ever see this.”