Richard Gere is going to be features on the next episode of Koffee With Karan and here is a short preview! Do not miss the episode this Sunday On Star World at 9PM!
Excerpts from the interview:
Karan: Alright so sexiest man really… my mother goes weak in her knees every time she sees you on television…
Richard: I had this bizarre thing happen… I was making a movie recently and there was a little press conference called for the same… and there was this young reporter there … so shy and she came up to me and said, Mr. Gere, “Three generations of women in my family love you…. my grandmother, my mother and me”, … and I started blushing….
Karan: Thank God I didn’t bring my mother here…. I don’t know what she would have done…. Because yesterday I told her Richard Gere is coming to my show… and she was like Oh my God.. I’ve seen Pretty Woman over a 100 times….
Richard: It’s a bit different here… you know these beautiful young girls come to me asking for an autograph and they say, “could you make that for my mother please” (laughs) …
Karan: We were reading some kind of stuff you know, the sexiest men in the business have actually dedicated their lives to a cause… There are so many of them working especially in your fraternity, you know be it Brad Pitt or George Clooney or you and there’s this whole perception of them being so sexy and yet all of them doing things like humanitarian issues they combating and fighting and doing stuff for… you know sometimes people feel that there is a contradiction, a) the perception is very sexy and you know of course you have been so sincere about it?
Richard: You know sometimes people feel there’s a contradiction when that happens, the perception that you being so sexy and you being so sincere about a cause… You know there is a tradition of this in America… I mean… there is a feeling that there is a responsibility that we all have whether we are movie stars or the technicians here in the studio; whatever maybe… we are all equal in our humanity. And we all do have a responsibility to help each other as far as transforming the planet and specially those people who suffer.
Karan: You have actually been very consistent in this, working with your heart and soul for a while (cause of HIV Aids), but a lot of other celebrities come in initially what do I call it, it’s considered fashionable to fight a cause or do something …
Richard: It’s not something that everyone does and maybe their interests are elsewhere or their voyage is elsewhere and there are other things they are working on. I don’t blame them for that, but I am thankful to the ones to whom it does touch them and they continue. For the first time, I came here and started working on HIV Aids which was a year ago, I thought that if we did two events, one in Delhi, one in Mumbai… it will change everything and I was very naïve and obviously for a moment there were newspapers, talks and photographers, basically a lot of attention to this subject… so it meant really building this up from ground zero… how to build an organization… how to build the network of friends, who are equally committed
Karan: Do you think, in India, AIDS is considered to be a homosexual disease? There is a lot of ignorance?
Richard: People just think… yes, it is primarily sexually transmitted… sex workers and truckers… they are the ones who are in this culture, labeled the ones, ‘That it is ok, if they die’ …
Karan: Oh God!!
Richard: Yes … But that’s basically that has happened here… and of course this disease has gone into the middle class community …
Karan: Yes, everywhere..
Richard: It’s gone into middle class homes… it’s gone into upper class homes…. Obviously the lower class homes… the primary target are the sex workers and the truckers…
Karan: Where do you see the Gere foundation a decade from today…
Richard: Well, hopefully the disease will be so much under control that we can move on and take up other causes
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