Til death us do part: Richard Gere and Uma Thurman chronicle the end of a life
Mar 24, 2025, updated Mar 25, 2025
An emotional investigation of mortality, Paul Schrader’s new film Oh, Canada is a bit dour at times, but don’t let that put you off.
It stars two Hollywood legends. Richard Gere and Uma Thurman play husband and wife in this film, which the writer-director adapted from Russell Banks’ 2021 novel, Foregone.
The author, a good friend of Schrader’s since the director made the 1997 film of his 1989 novel, Affliction, had died from cancer in 2023. Oh, Canada draws on Banks’ illness.
It follows Gere’s celebrated American documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife as he, too, is dying from cancer and agrees to be filmed for a highly personal documentary about his life. He will not allow his wife, Emma, out of his sight as they film in their home in Canada, where he has lived since fleeing the US during the Vietnam War.
Brisbane-born Jacob Elordi plays the young Leonard in flashbacks, while Gere also plays Leonard as a younger man.
‘I wondered, what would you be doing in the last hours of your life?’
Both cinema icons, Thurman, 54, and Gere, 75, who had his breakthrough starring in Schrader’s 1980 film American Gigolo, sat side by side for our interview in Cannes last year.
“I wondered, what would you be doing in the last hours of your life?” Gere says of playing Leonard Fife. “What would you be considering? What state would your mind be in? I kind of witnessed that with my father when he was dying.”
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Gere had been with his brother and sister on his father’s final night, just months before Schrader approached him with the script.
“My father wasn’t speaking, but he was hearing us and he was looking into our eyes and holding our hands,” Gere recalls. “He was exuding so much love, the deepest, most generous part of him. He was making his final connection with us and the following morning he was gone. He had no regrets.”
While Gere admits to channelling his father in the film, Thurman reflects on her role as a caregiver.
“Caring for someone in great pain over a long-term illness, you have to sort of live in the shadow,” she says. “Emma’s not vocalising what she’s thinking because she’s generously not having it be about her.
“She’s trying to manage someone she loves, who perhaps on a good day would be a narcissistic, a passionate artist, but on this day he is in great pain and is slightly losing his mind. Pieces of him are still present and she’s trying to honour the connective pieces that are left. I think that there’s something very beautiful about seeing that relationship.”
Both Thurman and Gere were huge sex symbols in their youth. So what advice would Gere give to 27-year-old Elordi as he navigates fame and, indeed, the sex symbol label?
“What’s interesting to me is that Jake is such a nice kid and he is so much more open than I was,” Gere responds. “When I was going through that process, I was just like, ‘I don’t want it, don’t look at me!’ I was like a scared animal. And I don’t see Jake that way. He’s able to enjoy it as it’s happening and also to keep a healthy perspective.”
Thurman’s daughter Maya (with Ethan Hawke) is also a rising star. Though the 26-year-old, most famous for the Netflix series Stranger Things, probably no longer needs her mum’s help. Thurman agrees. “Maya’s a pretty strong character,” she says.
Thurman, who rarely gives interviews, doesn’t adhere to any movie star image.
“It’s good to just be a performer, actually,” she tells me. “Occasionally, you’ll meet a really good actor who’s sort of tough, but mostly we’re really sensitive. Which is a tough call, because the entertainment industry is not the most sensitive of places. I’ve played some strong characters and it was great to play them. They give you so much.”
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Confidence?
“Yeah, swagger. I like that acting has given me the opportunity to be this big kind of character who is way more out there than I am.”
Though as she gets older, Thurman prefers to play happy characters.
“I really notice now that when I play someone who is happy, I feel happier,” she says. “I don’t relish playing these bummer people and I don’t even know what good it’s doing. When I was younger, I used to think that darkness was fascinating. I was very drawn towards it. Now I find it quite uninteresting.”
Gere reflects on his star-making turn in Schrader’s American Gigolo, in which he played a male escort accused of murder.
“I think we were essentially making a Bertolucci movie,” he says. “It was very Italian, with big crane shots, it was very fashion conscious, the people, the cars, the clothes, the girls. It was kind of a film noir within the context of a Bertolucci movie. It wasn’t a huge budget, but it had the weight of the studio behind it, the promotion machine to sell it. They were completely different years to now.”
Looking back, too, Gere notes how he had been a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.
“I was in the very first lottery and I was a high number, so I was going to be called,” he says. “I said, ‘Look, I can’t take a weapon and kill someone’. If you were a Quaker, you’d qualify for that. But I wasn’t a Quaker. I grew up Methodist. I wrote my essays and the key people in my community said it was genuine. But the draft board said, ‘No, too bad’. Ultimately, I did not get drafted.”
Did he contemplate going to Canada, given he had grown up in up-state New York, not far from the Canadian border?
“I did, actually, and I ended up running to begin with,” he recalls. “I was working in the theatre on the West Coast and the draft board was harassing my parents and their neighbours. So I came back and went through a process. And that’s when they decided I was not of the mental stability they wanted to give me a gun. So I became like the character in the movie. It was only in extreme emergencies that I would be called up.”
Oh, Canada releases in cinemas nationally on March 27.
Helen Barlow is a Paris-based Australian freelance journalist and critic. In 2019, she received the La Plume d’Or for her services to French cinema.