Actor Richard Gere offered a rare reflection on why he stayed away from the Oscars for nearly two decades, and he told Variety he never took the academy’s response to his past remarks too personally. Gere was essentially sidelined after going off script at the 1993 Academy Awards and condemning China’s “horrendous, horrendous human rights issue” in Tibet. Looking back, he said the academy’s reaction didn’t bother him the way some might expect.
“I didn’t take it particularly personally,” Gere 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]. So, in that sense, I don’t take it personally.”
Gere explained that much of his activism comes from his longtime friendship with the Dalai Lama, who is at the center of “Wisdom of Happiness,” a 2025 documentary he executive produced. He said the topic of his Oscars absence “never came up” between them, but he did recall rejecting a proposed biopic script about the Dalai Lama. “It was the silliest script I’d ever read,” he told the outlet, describing a plot in which “the CIA literally” rescues the Tibetan leader. He compared it to “Rambo coming and getting him out.”
As People noted, “Gere didn’t return to the Oscars stage until Feb. 24, 2013, nearly 20 years after he made his unscripted remarks,” and quoted then producer Gil Cates saying, “Does anyone care about Richard Gere’s comments about China? It’s arrogant.”
The conversation eventually turned to the state of the country under President Donald Trump. Gere said hearing the Dalai Lama speak made him feel the United States had veered onto the “very wrong track,” and he doubted Trump could be swayed. “I don’t know that it would touch him,” Gere said. “I would hope that it would.
I would pray that it would. But, boy, I don’t know how you explain what he has done to this country, what it feels like to be an American now, 10 or 11 months in. It’s just astonishing. It’s beyond what anyone could ever imagine.”
He urged Americans to elect leaders who can bring people together. “If we want a world a certain way, then we have to elect leaders who have a similar vision to us and will lead us towards this higher level of possibility … Especially, as I say, coming from this very crude mentality that is now in our leadership.”