Before Julia Roberts sat on Richard Gere’s fax in “Pretty Woman,” she wrote him a special note on a Post-it.
“She takes a piece of paper, a Post-it,” Gere said about his first time meeting with Roberts during the 25-year reunion of the cast and director on the “Today” show Tuesday, which also included director Garry Marshall and actors Hector Elizondo (Barney Thompson) and Laura San Giacomo (Kit De Luca).
“She’s writing something and turns it around and pushes it toward me,” Gere continued, “and it said, ‘Please say yes.’”
The then-21-year-old Roberts, who was cast as the lovable prostitute Vivian Ward, or Viv, put on the charm in order to get him to agree to star alongside her in the Marshall-directed film.
“It was so sweet and I said, ‘I just said yes,’” Gere said about informing Marshall on the phone while sitting across from Roberts and her note that he agreed to play the wealthy businessman, Edward Lewis, who ends up falling for Viv after hiring her for her services.
For “Pretty Woman” fans and Roberts, it doesn’t feel like 25 years since the cult classic first hit the big screen in 1990.
“It doesn’t to me,” she said after host Matt Lauer asked if it seemed like that many years since making the film.
For Gere, it feels like eons ago.
“It seems like 45 years,” he joked. “Honestly, it feels like a long time ago we did that … that was two marriages ago for me, so a lot of things happened.”
A lot happened with the original script, as well, with the film initially being titled “3,000,” a dark drama about drug abuse and prostitution with the title referring to “how much she got paid,” Roberts said.
Marshall and Disney’s vision was quite different and the script suddenly took a romantic comedy turn.
“Over a weekend,” Roberts recalled seeing the potential for her first feature film slip away. But just as quickly as she lost the “3,000” gig, she regained the starring role in the film’s new direction because “she had that smile,” Marshall recalled.
However, her leading man could have gone to Charles Grodin instead of Gere.
“The truth is I made the test with Charles Grodin,” Marshall confessed.
Gere actually turned the role down a few times because he felt Edward Lewis “was just a suit. You can put a suit on a goat.”
“I just didn’t get it,” he added.
But the chemistry between him and Roberts was undeniable and that, along with her Post-it, convinced him to take the part.
“I was so mesmerized I don’t remember Gary,” Gere recalled from Marshall’s initial introduction of the two stars. “I just remember the girl.”
That girl was hard to forget, but Gere wasn’t exactly a nobody. In fact, the film’s impact and his recognition because of it was felt around the world, literally.
The 65-year-old actor remembered traveling to Borneo, the largest island of Asia, on “a missionary flight.”
“They got bones in their ears … I’m in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “I get in this boat and they take me down to the long house and we pull up on shore and they start going, ‘Pretty Woman man!’ ‘Pretty Woman man!’ They’ve never seen a movie in their entire life but they know ‘Pretty Woman.’”
Sort of like the movie’s unforgettable lines.
“If I forget to tell you later,” Lauer said, referring to a line Roberts affectionately told Gere in the film. “I had a really good time.”
