Richard Gere won at acting this weekend, when he method acted his way to some free pizza, playing a hobo so convincingly in the upcoming Time Out Of Mind (shooting above, with Gere and Kyra Sedgewick) that a tourist who wandered into the Grand Central Station set tried to give him her leftovers. It was a sweet gesture, but sad to see that pizza wasted on someone who didn’t really need it in the middle of a city where thousands of actors probably went hungry that night.
Kindhearted tourist Karine Gombeau, 42, of Paris, had come from a bon voyage to Little Italy with her family Tuesday when she spotted a man who appeared to be a hobo sifting through the trash near Grand Central Terminal, she told The Post Saturday.
Touched by the sorry sight, Gombeau offered him leftovers from an “enormous” pizza that she, her husband and 15-year-old son had ordered at an Italian eatery, she told The Post.
“What’s in the bag?” Gere, 64, asked.
“I tried to tell him in English, but it came out half in French,” she said.
“I said, ‘Je suis désolée [I am sorry], but the pizza is cold.’ ”
Apparently, millionaire beggars can’t be choosers.
“He said, ‘Thank you so much. God bless you,’ ” Gombeau recalled.
That’s how you can tell he was an actor. If you told a real NY hobo “Je suis désolée [I am sorry], but the pizza is cold,” he’d probably say “Well pardon my French, but go f*ck yourself.”
Gombeau, who works in the tourist industry, said it broke her heart to see homeless people in the Big Apple.
Time out, a kind-hearted Parisien tourism worker? No way, this has to be a viral marketing stunt by the Paris Tourism Board.
Before bumping into Gere, her husband had been shooting video of Grand Central, for fun, on his handheld camera, she said. They didn’t realized they had stumbled onto the set of Gere’s new movie, “Time Out of Mind.”
One detail, however, probably should have tipped off the tourist trio.
“People came from all over the station and told my husband to stop filming,” Gombeau said. “People came out of the subways. It was very confusing.” [NYPost]
Aw, this is probably the sweetest story ever to end with a production assistant getting fired.