Richard Gere's Unfaithful director tried "unsuccessfully" to get him to gain weight by secretly supplying him with cookies.
The 76-year-old actor starred as Edward, the wronged husband in Adrian Lyne's 2002 film, which sees his on-screen wife Connie (Diane Lane) have an affair with Olivier Martinez's seductive stranger Paul, and the filmmaker knew he needed to make the Pretty Woman heartthrob seem like the duller, more pedestrian love option so resorted to desperate measures to make him less physically appealing.
Speaking during a Q+A at a screening of Unfaithful at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, Entertainment Weekly reports Adrian said: “I was very anxious that Richard wouldn’t be his sort of athletic self ... so I tried to get him to be, unsuccessfully, I tried to get him to be overweight, a little bit overweight.
"So I put cookies and stuff in his clothes — that he didn’t eat. Well, he ate them one day, and then he realised what I was doing.”
But while Richard may have been wise to Adrian's ruse, he impressed the director with his transformative performance, particularly during a scene where Connie, who is deep into her affair, is taking a bath and pretends not to be reluctant when Edward asks to join her in the tub.
He said: “I think it’s a heartbreaker when he gets into the bath, you know, when she doesn’t want him to be in there.
“And I thought he was wonderful in that scene, actually. And there’s a lovely sort of change in the score ... when he tries to get to grips with her ... and it sort of goes sour beautifully on the score. I think it was good. I think that scene worked quite well, really.”
Filming on Unfaithful hit a slight glitch when shooting the scene where Connie was blown into Paul during a New York City windstorm because the machine used for the breezy effect was too powerful.
The director recalled: “We started off with a jet engine for the wind, and we tried it once, one take we did, and a full bottle of beer came crashing down from the top floor of ... one building.
“And so we stopped the jet and moved on to a quieter one that wasn’t quite so powerful. It was very impressive, the jet one, but it annoyed people.”
