For a guy best known as a heartthrobby, romantic lead — his most famous roles are still in "Pretty Woman" (1990) and "An Officer and a Gentleman" (1982) — Richard Gere has done more action work than you'd think.
See, for example, his turn in 2009's "Brooklyn's Finest," directed by action-film auteur Antoine Fuqua. Or the espionage thriller "The Jackal" (1997), starring opposite blow-em-up legend Bruce Willis (known to many first and foremost for the Die Hard franchise).
And Gere embraces the genre with his whole self — for example, he got hurt doing his own stunts for "The Double" (2011), in which he played a retired CIA operative, and "First Knight" (1995), in which he played a different kind of action character: Sir Lancelot.
"First Knight" actually seems to represent a bit of a turning point in his relationship to action, and he admitted at the time to feeling thrown into the deep end during the shoot.
"When I read the script, at first I had no idea there would be so much action," he said in an interview with Variety magazine. He said that while tending to a head wound after being thrown from a horse.
Head wound aside, that could explain why much of his action work has come later in his career — he proved (or maybe realized) that he could do it on "Knight."
Of course, with his silver-fox good looks and his acting chops, action has remained just a sideline to his dramatic and romantic work.
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