Almost 20 years after starring in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Cotton Club", Richard Gere returns to the Jazz Age for the musical "Chicago"...
You last strutted your stuff in the 70s as Danny in the London stage production of "Grease". Did you feel you were a bit rusty?
Rob [Marshall, the director] and I had our first meeting in a restaurant in New York. I'd read the script and really liked it. I thought it had a lot more going for it than the stage production.
I told him I could sing and I understood the character, and I'd have fun with that. But I don't tap dance, so that was the issue. Thankfully I had a wonderful tap teacher. Rob took such good care of us. And you don't get to see the bad stuff!
Were you warned that this might be a bad career move?
No. Actually, it was my agent who was pushing for it much more than I was. I was a little resistant because I wasn't that taken with the stage production. But my agent just really kept pushing.
I had just done a very intense movie, "Unfaithful", and I thought, At the very least I'm going to have fun doing this.
I started my career doing musicals in New York. So it was very easy for me to work within that medium. In New York I did five or six rock musicals, folk operas, and rock operas. Then I came over here [London] and did "Grease". I was a young man and that was a huge experience for me, both as a person and a performer.
There's a sequence where you're portrayed as ventriloquist with RenΓ©e sitting in your lap. Was it more difficult to play certain scenes, given the complicated set-up?
It was great fun trying to figure out how to do it. We didn't know, and I don't think Rob knew, which lines would be done naturalistically and which would be done on stage. A lot of it was just playing around to see what would work. I realised there were going to be 26 guys doing circus routines behind us and pyrotechnics going off everywhere. I also realised that no one was going to be watching me anyway.
"Chicago" is now playing in London. It opens in the rest of the UK on Friday 17th January 2003.
