The real gap between Richard Gere and his co-star Diana Silvers is 48 years, and cameras have been catching hand-holding, near-kisses and rain-soaked park benches all over New York. The movie’s whole subject is what that kind of imbalance does to two people, which is exactly why the streets keep filling up with paparazzi.
Gere is 76 and Silvers is 28, a real-life 48-year gap playing out on Manhattan sidewalks for a movie that was built to examine it.
The film is Asymmetry, Edward Zwick’s adaptation of Lisa Halliday’s 2018 novel, his first feature in eight years. Gere plays Ezra Blazer, a 70-year-old literary giant; Silvers plays Alice, the young editorial assistant who catches his eye in Central Park.
Halliday wrote the book after her own relationship with Philip Roth, which began when she was in her 20s working at a literary agency. Ezra is fiction, she’s said, an amalgam, but the resemblance to Roth is intentional and widely discussed. Roth read a proof and called the novel “a considerable achievement.”
Production started in New York in early July and has been impossible to miss, with a fake-snow Christmas sequence, intimate street walks, and an August 5 scene where Gere held an umbrella over both of them in the Central Park rain, then handed it to Silvers after the take.
The age gap has driven most of the online reaction, along with comparisons to Pretty Woman. Zwick frames the story as two people discovering that what the world calls asymmetry can also be called love. Sources close to Gere say the chemistry is purely professional, and that his wife, whom he married in 2018 with a 33-year gap of their own, is not the least bit threatened.
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