Hollywood is no stranger to controversial casting, but the first set photos and videos from Edward Zwick’s new film Asymmetry have ignited a firestorm.
The film stars Richard Gere, 76, and Diana Silvers, 28, as romantic leads. The 48-year age difference was instantly the headline, before a single trailer has even dropped.
The Plot: more than just a romance
Asymmetry is based on Lisa Halliday’s acclaimed 2018 debut novel of the same name. It’s being directed by Oscar-winner Edward Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai, Legends of the Fall), who is also writing and producing.
The logline is simple and literary: A young editorial assistant in New York, Alice (Silvers), comes upon world-renowned 70-year-old author Ezra (Gere) in Central Park one day. What begins as a chance encounter spirals into a secret, life-changing romance.
In the book, the story is famously told in three distinct sections and explores the imbalances that spark and sustain our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame and geography. The first novella, titled “Folly,” is explicitly inspired by Halliday’s own affair with the late Philip Roth – with Ezra Blazer being a clear fictional stand-in for Roth. It’s a novel about asymmetry, not just a story that has it.
Production began earlier this month in New York, with FilmNation launching sales at the Cannes Film Market. Gere, who has appeared in only five films in the last decade, was last seen in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada.
Why the photos and videos caused such a stir
On July 13, Gere and Silvers were photographed filming intimate scenes in a New York City park – sitting closely on a bench, holding hands, Gere’s arm around her.
On X and Instagram, the reaction was immediate and polarized:
“ENOUGH. Enough with normalizing couples in movies with an absurd age difference.”
Other users pointed out the math: “48 year age gap!”, while some noted Silvers is nearly the same age as Gere’s own son Homer.
On the other side, many defended the project, noting that the film is faithful to its source material and that the entire point of Halliday’s novel is to examine that exact discomfort. The buzz, as one report noted, is because the significant age difference between the characters mirrors one of the novel’s central themes.
It’s also worth noting that this isn’t new for Gere. The quintessential romantic lead of Pretty Woman and An Officer and a Gentleman is no stranger to age-gap stories on screen, and his own marriage to Alejandra Silva, who is 34 years younger than him, has been part of the conversation too.
Art should not be censored
Here is where I stand. Cinema’s job is not to make us comfortable. Its job is to hold a mirror up to uncomfortable realities, power dynamics, and human contradictions. Asymmetry is literally named after imbalance. To tell a story about age, power, fame and talent – and then be told you can’t cast it accurately because it makes people uncomfortable on set photos – is absurd.
We should not censor art before we have even seen it. If the film romanticizes a predatory dynamic without critique, we can and should criticize it. If it uses the age gap to ask intelligent, painful questions about who holds power in a relationship between a famous old man and a young woman trying to become a writer, then it will have done exactly what good literature and good cinema are supposed to do.
Richard Gere and Diana Silvers are two adults, two professional actors, playing two characters from a celebrated novel. The camera will show what Edward Zwick wants us to see.
Watch the film first. Then form your own opinion.
Richard Gere and Diana Silvers are filming ‘Asymmetry’ – and the Internet can’t stop talking about It
