You Won’t Runaway From Richard Gere’s Glowing First Impression of Julia Roberts
You Won’t Runaway From Richard Gere’s Glowing First Impression of Julia Roberts
Richard Gere was once just an actor, standing in front of Julia Roberts, knowing she’d be a star.
The Pretty Woman alum, who worked with the future Oscar winner on both the 1990 rom-com and 1999’s Runaway Bride recently shared the first impression he had of his costar.
“When I met her the first time, she just glowed,” he recalled to E! News while at the Cannes Film Festival for the Oh, Canada premiere. “She hadn’t become, Julia Roberts. She was just this delightful person.”
He noted of her starpower, “It was unmistakable.”
And Richard isn’t the only one who was charmed by their meet-cute.
After all, Julia recalled her first impression of the 74-year-old—which came when she and the film’s director, the late Garry Marshall, flew to New York to convince him to join the cast.
“I’m like, ‘Mom, I’m flying to New York with Garry Marshall,’ we’re gonna see Richard Gere,'” she gushed to SiriusXM in 2017. “We go to his apartment and we talked and he was very
Eventually though, Garry abandoned Julia to be alone with Richard—and she found herself begging him to take on the role.
“He’s a very serious actor,” she said. “I think I just nodded and smiled a lot and agreed with everything he said. I said, ‘You have to do this movie, if you don’t do this movie and it falls apart and I lose this job it’ll just be terrible’ I kind of pleaded with him.”
