Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere are Vogue’s September cover stars! They had the glow of two people running on very little sleep—but lots of adrenaline—when they joined The Run-Through for their first joint interview, just ahead of The Shards’ premiere. The co-stars of Ryan Murphy’s new adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s 2023 novel were candid, funny, and clearly delighted to be doing press together. Asked for her elevator pitch for the show, Gerber—a Ryan Murphy veteran who also counts herself among Ellis’s biggest fans—called The Shards “a seductive drama thriller” following privileged teenagers as they collide with obsession, identity, and violence in 1981 Los Angeles. Gere, who was recording his first podcast, offered a punchier synopsis: it’s like Euphoria, he said, “If it was in the ’80s and was also a horror and was also Glee.”
Much of the conversation turned, fittingly, to what makes Ellis’s story so unsettling in the first place. For Gerber, the answer lies not in the show’s more graphic moments but in the eerie flatness with which her character and the rest of the cast greet even the most traumatic events. “A lot of the horror comes from the lack of reaction to the horror,” she explained. Gere agreed, describing it not as shock, but slow-building dread. The two also traced the emotional through line back to their September cover shoot, photographed by Steven Meisel. It was another first for Gere, while Gerber has worked with the photographer since she was 13. (To hear Gerber tell it, however, Gere was a natural.)
The friends had the intimate, inside-joke energy of two people who’ve spent the better part of a year together on set. There was the cast’s six-person group chat, unfortunately nicknamed “The Sharts”; Gere’s failed attempt to sneak home a pair of the show’s leather pants, which he wore, by his own count, for six months straight; and the very sweet wrap gift that Gere chose for Gerber.
