Featured Image Credit: Kevin Mazur/Getty
Topics: Oscars, Academy Awards, Film and TV, Celebrity
Callum Jones
Topics: Oscars, Academy Awards, Film and TV, Celebrity
Pretty Woman actor Richard Gere said he doesn't take it 'particularly personally' that the Oscars banned him for 20 years, twice as long as Will Smith got for hitting Chris Rock on stage.
Smith was banned from the Oscars in 2022 after the infamous moment where he slapped Chris Rock following a joke made about Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, being bald.
The line drew some laughs from the crowd, including Smith himself, before he realized his wife did not see the funny side, so he marched on stage and slapped Rock before yelling: "Keep my wife's name out of your f**king mouth."
Smith was banned a week later for a whopping ten years, but Gere was punished even more severely for criticizing the Chinese government while he was presenting at the Oscars in 1993.
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Gere, a practising Buddhist, had a personal stake in the ongoing tensions between China and Tibet at the time. Tibet was pushing for greater independence after China annexed the region in the 1950s, with the Dalia Lamia still in exile to this day after fleeing Tibet in 1959.
An Amnesty International report in 1995 accused China of torturing Tibetan children accused of political offences and imprisoning Buddhist monks and nuns engaged in peaceful protest without trial.
In the speech, Gere addressed then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, stating he could be watching the Oscars 'right now with his children and his grandchildren'.
Referencing the 'horrendous human rights situation' in China and Tibet, Gere then asked the crowd to 'send love and truth and kind of sanity to Deng Xiaoping right now in Beijing', before asking the head of state to take 'his troops and take the Chinese away from Tibet and allow these people to live as free independent people again'.
Though the speech was met with loud applause, Gere was ultimately blacklisted for 20 years and was not permitted to attend the Oscars again until 2013.
In an interview published yesterday (December 3), Gere spoke about his past ban in a rare comment about the whole scandal.
"I didn’t take it particularly personally,” the 76-year-old told Variety. "I didn’t think there were any bad guys in the situation.
"I do what I do and I certainly don’t mean anyone any harm. I mean to harm anger. I mean to harm exclusion. I mean to harm human rights abuses, but I try to stay as close to where His Holiness comes from… that everyone is redeemable, and in the end, everyone has to be redeemed or none of us [are]."
Gere concluded by saying he didn't take the ban personally despite being blacklisted for the best part of two decades.
While it's extremely rare for Gere to speak about the ban, his recent interview is not the first time he's touched on it.
Speaking with HuffPost UK in 2013, at the time the ban was lifted, Gere joked about the blacklisting, stating: "Apparently, I've been rehabilitated. It seems if you stay around long enough, they forget they've banned you."