The show’s ensemble is anchored by Igby Rigney, who plays Bret (Ellis’s younger self, more or less), an aspiring writer, closeted, whose girlfriend, Debbie Schaffer, is the daughter of a major Hollywood producer. But it’s Kaia Gerber as Susan Reynolds, Bret’s best friend, and Homer Gere as Robert Mallory, the mysterious new arrival, who give the show’s credit sequence its frisson. Gerber’s mother is, of course, Cindy Crawford, and Gere’s father is Richard Gere; together they were among the iconic couples of the early ’90s. (Indeed, they were photographed by Herb Ritts for the November 1992 cover of this magazine.)
“Maybe it seems too on the nose,” Homer Gere says of this next-gen casting coup. He remembers meeting Gerber for the first time, along with a few other Shards cast members, at Ye Rustic Inn in Los Feliz. “That’s Kaia’s spot. It’s, like, her chill I’m-gonna-go-have-a-beer-and-smoke-a-cig-outside spot. Twenty minutes into knowing each other, I was like, ‘Should we just acknowledge the fact that our parents were married?’ She was like, ‘Yeah. Cool.’ And that was it.”
Gere has brought me to the Noguchi Museum, an ivy-clad fortress occupying a quiet triangular block of Long Island City, Queens. It’s an important place for him, not merely because it houses an arresting collection of the Japanese American artist’s abstract carved-stone and basalt sculptures. Gere, who was a visual arts major at Brown, came to know the museum when he produced a painstaking replica of one of Isamu Noguchi’s paper lamps for an architecture class. It’s an unusually hot late-spring afternoon, and he is wearing blue USA rugby shorts that he thrifted last week in Rome, a T-shirt he stole from his dad’s closet that was a long-ago gift from Bruce Weber, and a beat-to-hell New York Yankees cap. This is his first interview, he tells me. He admits that he is nervous and adds that someone advised him to avoid sarcasm because it doesn’t translate well in print.
