Richard Gere was spotted in New York this week filming romantic scenes with co-star Diana Silvers for their age gap love story Asymmetry. Gere, who turns 77 at the end of the month, plays a revered author called Ezra in the film. Silvers, 28, stars alongside him as a literary assistant named Alice.
The movie is based on Lisa Halliday's acclaimed 2018 roman a clef of the same name. As a young woman, Halliday became romantically involved with Portnoy's Complaint author Philip Roth, an exalted literary lion 43 years her senior.
Off screen, Gere is married to 43-year-old Spanish publicist Alejandra Silva, his third wife, who is more than three decades younger than he is. Meanwhile, Silvers is closer in age to Gere's 26-year-old son Homer, who stars on the new Ryan Murphy series The Shards alongside 24-year-old Kaia Gerber, the daughter of Gere's former wife Cindy Crawford.
Silvers and Gere were glimpsed filming a sequence that saw their characters indulge in an ice cream date on a sunlit park bench. The Daily Mail has contacted representatives for Gere and Silvers for comment.
In the novel, the lead characters meet over Mister Softee cones in Central Park, suggesting the scene being filmed this week might be their introduction.
According to the film's logline, the pair "create a private world just for two" after their chance encounter leads to the flowering of an illicit relationship.
The logline adds: "Ezra, famous for his audacious work, finds someone with whom he can be openly vulnerable, and Alice finds the courage to explore her own aspirations as a writer. Until it is all put at risk when their secret relationship is exposed."
Production Details and Director
Asymmetry is written, directed and produced by Edward Zwick, who won a best picture Oscar for his role as a producer on Shakespeare in Love. As a director, Zwick's filmography includes the 1980s romantic comedy About Last Night starring Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, the 1994 western Legends of the Fall starring Brad Pitt, and the 2003 Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai.
Gere and his current wife were family friends for years before exchanging vows in 2018 on his massive ranch in upstate New York, since when they have welcomed two sons, seven-year-old Alexander and six-year-old James.
At the time that they first struck up their romance in 2015, Gere and Silva were both in the process of divorcing their previous spouses. The celebrity Buddhist was disentangling himself from his union to Bond girl Carey Lowell, who is Homer's mother, while Silva's prior husband was Govind Friedland, whose father is billionaire mining tycoon Robert Friedland.
Real Life Marriage and Background
Silva recalled that she was a "little girl" when Gere first met her while borrowing a boat from her father Ignacio Silva, the former vice president of Real Madrid FC. Their paths crossed again in 2014 in Positano, where she was running a hotel, and at that point she reminded him of their first introduction.
In reference to their connection, Silva said: "Our karma brought us together as soon as we saw each other because we've known each other over the course of many lives, that's how we both feel anyway."
Addressing the decades-wide chasm between them, Silva remarked: "I'm not ignoring our age difference and what it means to be with a Hollywood star, but when there's such a strong karmic energy, the problems disappear."
Previous Marriage to Cindy Crawford
By contrast, Gere's first wife Cindy Crawford, who was married to him from 1991 to 1995, argued that their 15-year age gap opened a gulf between their sensibilities. Crawford and Gere were introduced in the late 1980s at a barbecue hosted by the legendary fashion photographer Herb Ritts. At the time, Crawford was 22 and her modeling career was on the ascent, while Gere was 37 and had already established himself as an A-list film star.
Speaking to Oprah Winfrey in a 2013 interview on Master Class, Crawford said: "I think a lot of what happened with Richard and I was that I was still 22 and at 22, as a young woman, I was kind of still figuring out who I was and what I wanted to be and he was already 37."
Crawford added: "So in some ways, he knew that I was still growing and changing. I just didn't want to hear it from him because at 22 you think you know everything. You think you're already formed. And then you realize, 10 years later, that they were totally right."
