Richard Gere is receiving critical acclaim for his role as a hedge fund magnate in tense new thriller Arbitrage.The Hollywood superstar talked to Susan Griffin about playing a billionaire and always being ignored for the Oscar nominations...

Tricky, earnest and difficult are just some of the adjectives that have been used to describe Richard Gere in interviews over the years. But while talking to him about his latest movie, Arbitrage, he is nothing but charming.

These days it takes a lot for the actor, 63, to leave his boutique hotel in upstate New York, the place he shares with former model and Bond girl Carey Lowell, his wife of 10 years, and their 13-year-old son Homer, but Arbitrage stood out.

“My agents were very clever,” he explains. “They gave me the script and I said, ‘Tell me more’. They said, ‘No, just read the script’. I read it and it was really terrific.”

The fact Arbitrage was set in New York was another draw but, as it transpired, there was one concern. “My agents said ‘The good news is the script, the bad news is he’s never made a movie before’,” says Gere, referring to burgeoning director and screenwriter Nicholas Jarecki, a graduate from NYU Film School.

But what Jarecki lacked in experience, he made up for in knowledge of the film’s subject matter. As the son of traders, he knows the financial world very well, says Gere. In the end the actor decided to jump in and The result is a taut, suspenseful thriller about hedge fund magnate Robert Miller that begins on the eve of his 60th birthday. On the surface he appears to be the epitome of success, but behind the gilded walls of his mansion he’s in over his head, desperately trying to complete the sale of his trading to a major bank before the depths of his fraud are revealed.

Gere says he wasn’t interested in conveying Miller as an all-out villain. “It’s the job of an actor to make any character human – any character. I chose to make this guy as multi-dimensional as I could because I’ve never met someone who was one thing.”

Miller’s decisions aren’t always conventionally moral but, like many characters in the movie, he tells himself he’s doing the wrong thing for the right reason.

“I don’t think any of us are true all the time,” says Gere. “There’s an element of spin in almost everything we do as human beings.”

Raised in a small town outside New York, the young Gere’s mother would take him and his siblings to music lessons and it wasn’t unknown for the Methodist family to gather around the piano for a sing-song. Gaining a gymnastics scholarship, he studied philosophy at the University Of Massachusetts but dropped out to “get serious about acting”. He successfully auditioned for a rock opera before taking the lead in Grease when it opened in London. After a couple of small film parts, he landed his first substantial role in 1977’s Looking For Mr Goodbar with Diane Keaton. He went on to play a prostitute in American Gigolo, then along came An Officer And A Gentleman followed by Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts.

He’s since admitted he wasn’t sure about doing the latter, but industry friends talked him into it. “They’re a lifetime ago,” he says now. “I saw An Officer And A Gentleman in New York not that long ago and of course I recognise it but in many ways it was another person. Thank God I like the movies, so they’re very easy to live with.”

In the 23 years since Pretty Woman was released, Gere has appeared in a wide range of films but hasn’t been nominated for an Oscar.

This year he was nominated for a Golden Globe for Arbitrage but was ignored by Oscar once again. Is he miffed? “You know, if there were nominations it would help the film. We didn’t have a big studio behind us and we shot it very quickly on a small budget.”But he’s not feeling jaded about the movie industry, explaining: “I don’t want to waste time, so I have to have some sort of strong connection to the material, and the people, to want to do it. But I still like making movies, yeah. It’s fun and still play for me."