Hollywood actor Richard Gere is being black-balled by Hollywood No he is not an outspoken Trump supporter waving his confederate flag at the back of a red pickup truck down rodeo drive or married to his second cousin mimicking an ancient cult. Gere is being blackballed in Hollywood simply because Chinese investors that finance tons of Hollywood studio movies hate his guts.
Gere is a good friend of the Dalai Lama and a practicing Buddhist. During a presentation at the 1993 Oscars, he ridiculed the Chinese government. He also railed against the Chinese government calling for the boycott of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing due to human rights violations in China and the lack of independence of Tibet.
Gere has turned to working on independent projects but that seems to be hitting a snag.
“There was something I was going to do with a Chinese director, and two weeks before we were going to shoot, he called saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t do it,'” Gere describes. “We had a secret phone call on a protected line. If I had worked with this director, he, his family would never have been allowed to leave the country ever again, and he would never work.”
In the spirit of Muhammad Ali, Susan Sarandon, Colin Kaepernick and countless others, Gere joins a list of public figures that have seen their livelihood affected by speaking out for the oppressed.