Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere Have Heard It All Before

In his best-selling 2024 book, The Anxious Generation, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that today’s adolescents, flowering in a hothouse paned in iPhone glass, lack the exposure to chance and accident—not to mention to one another—that tends to produce daring, adaptable, and independent adults. Haidt, who is the same age as the writer Bret Easton Ellis, waxes nostalgic for many of the freedoms enjoyed in Ellis’s 2023 novel, The Shards. But probably not all of them. While Haidt bemoans the current generation’s lack of what he calls “free play,” meandering and unsupervised, Ellis’s young protagonists play with an abandon that verges on recklessness. The kids in The Shards might benefit from an occasional watchful eye, if only their parents weren’t vacationing in Europe indefinitely.

This month Ryan Murphy brings his adaptation of The Shards to FX, and for those still floating on the ’90s reverie of Love Story, his chronicle of the courtship, marriage, and tragic end of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, here is another occasion for sensory time travel, to a world even more pleasingly analog, with even tighter jeans. Ellis’s setting is Los Angeles in 1981, when the lives of a group of seniors at an elite private school are disrupted by a new student with a shadowy past. These kids are fast, weaving through the canyon in luxury cars, snorting cocaine, throwing sumptuous parties at their parents’ houses, peacocking, fornicating, clubbing, and country-clubbing. All the while, a serial killer known as the Trawler is targeting young women from the city’s wealthy neighborhoods.

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.

“I just want to appear likable,” he says ingenuously. “I talked to my dad about this, and he said, ‘You’re playing a character even when you’re yourself in some way.’ You know? I understand the game a little more, I think, than a person who has done as little work as I have should. I grew up in the most normal possible situation given who my father was. I didn’t grow up in the industry at all. I had never been on a professional set until last summer.”

Gere and Gerber could not have come to The Shards with more different CVs. Gerber began modeling at 10 and was 16 when she walked a major runway. She has had roles in two previous Ryan Murphy productions, among other television and film work, and Murphy had her in mind for the role of Susan, the beautiful and brainy student body president, as soon as The Shards was greenlit. Gere’s arrival at acting was desultory, though maybe inevitable. He grew up in Westchester, New York, with Richard Gere and his mother, the actress Carey Lowell. Though his parents divorced when he was 13, he remembers his childhood as “idyllic.” Richard, who was 50 when Homer was born, made a point of building a family away from Hollywood. Upstate, Homer was raised essentially as an only child, though he is in fact one of seven siblings in a complex blended family: He has stepbrothers aged 36 and 40; a half sister aged 36; a stepbrother aged 13; and two half brothers, six and seven. On his mother’s side, he is the youngest; on his father’s side, the oldest.

“I was not a theater kid at all,” he recalls. “Not. At. All. I was a jock. I mean, I think I was a sensitive jock! But I had grown up my entire childhood with people asking, ‘Are you gonna be an actor when you’re older?’ And I was like, ‘Fuck no.’ I was good in school, and I had no pressure from my parents. Acting was always over there”—he flicks his hand to the side—“it was some other thing that other people did. There are a million happy lives that you can live, you know? And it’s a complicated life. I think I knew that firsthand.”

“You watch The Shards, and it makes you long for a time when you could get into a little bit of trouble without it being on the internet the next day,” Gerber says

In college, Gere marched from major to major before discovering that he liked to make art. During the pandemic, he took a gap year, driving across the country and falling madly in love with the outdoors. Sport climbing is Gere’s passion. He relishes the challenge of working through difficult predicaments in nature in highly controlled ways. Climbing runs in the bloodline: His maternal grandfather, the geologist James Lowell, has scaled every 14,000-foot mountain in Colorado, and, at 26, Gere has made it up 11 out of 52.

Back on campus in the fall of 2022, when he was a junior, a friend asked him to act in a short student film. “All of a sudden I was involved in the film community on campus,” he remembers. “And every semester from then on, that was my main focus. I was trying to make sketches with my friends or, you know, how many sets can I be a part of? Can I do production design for you guys? Can I do location scouting? I just wanted to be on a team.” Gere graduated in 2024 despite a concussion sustained playing club soccer that caused him to miss his final exams. After some time at home with his mother in Katonah, New York, and not seeing a clear path forward for himself, he spent a few months in Colorado, camping, hiking, and climbing. That’s when he got an out of the blue call from a talent manager who had seen one of his student films and wanted to know if he was interested in representation. “I was like, Okay, maybe this is a sign.”

To this point, Gere’s exposure to Los Angeles had taken the form of Ed Limato, his father’s legendary agent, pulling up to his childhood home in Westchester. The door of Limato’s limousine would open, and a cloud of cigarette smoke, like a breath of Old Hollywood, would herald his emergence. Homer and his father have not talked much about acting. Instead they tend to discuss the politics of the set and the perils of celebrity. “I’m an introvert who has developed enough social skills to function,” he says. “I think my dad is the same.”

Gere’s parents both have enduring affiliations with Tibetan Buddhism, and its teachings have left an immovable mark. “Having a father who practices meditation—and in particular compassion meditation—an hour a day for the last 50 years definitely affects you,” he says. “It gives you a window into the real work that you can do on yourself. I didn’t know my dad when he was in his 20s, but I think he was kind of a brat.” He laughs. “He’s grown a lot. That’s the whole game, isn’t it? You’re never a finished product. For me the biggest lesson of Buddhism is the basic attitude of non-harming. It’s like, you want to wish everyone the best of whatever that version is for them. No matter what the vibe is. Whether it’s someone you like, someone you don’t like, it just makes life a lot easier to move through.”

He auditioned for two series in the spring of 2025, Euphoria and The Shards, and he and his father were in India for the Dalai Lama’s birthday celebration when he got a call from Murphy’s team asking him to come for a screen test. He flew to Los Angeles, landed the part of Robert Mallory, and two weeks later also got the role of Dylan Reid, a TV star who ends up the target of Cassie’s sexual opportunism, in Euphoria. “In September I drove cross-country, moved into the Villa Carlotta, and suddenly I’m doing a bedroom scene with Sydney Sweeney,” Gere recalls. “It was fucking crazy.”

Gerber was surprised to find herself the most seasoned of the Shards ensemble. Hayes Warner, who plays Debbie, is a singer with no previous TV or film credits. Graham Campbell, who plays Susan’s boyfriend, Thom Wright, is also on TV for the first time. “Fame was something that I was born into, so I didn’t experience what it was like to become famous,” Gerber explains. “I kind of thought that my way of being raised was the most anonymous it could get under the circumstances, and then I met Homer. Like, there are no photos of him as a child online, whereas my entire childhood and teenage years are on the internet. I can only imagine. I’m 24 but…very interviewed.”

We are sitting at the Chateau Marmont, a sentimental place for Gerber since it housed the writers room for The Shards and was the setting for cast dinners presided over by Murphy, almost in loco parentis. Gerber tells a different story about her first meeting with Gere and their other castmates at her favorite dive bar last summer. Gere walked in late (Gerber, like her mother, is famously punctual) wearing a hat and a grin, and she thought, Wow, he’s so like his character. “I think Homer has Robert’s charisma without his cruelty,” she says. “I looked around, and I said to the group, ‘You guys are all so much like your characters. That’s so interesting, since I’m nothing like mine.’ Which was so dumb. They all looked at me, and they go, ‘Hmm. No, I don’t think you’re the exception.’ Susan is a lot more like me than I want to admit.”

Gerber’s current life in Los Angeles exists mostly outside the orbit of her Malibu childhood. “Unfortunately all the things that people assume are true,” she says. “I was in the ocean every day. My brother would go surfing and then walk up to school in his wetsuit with his surfboard, barefoot. You’re with the same kids from preschool to when you graduate. There were no Ubers there, so your parents were driving you to parties and then picking you up. There was only so much trouble you could get into.”

In other words, though she was first photographed by Steven Meisel as a 13-year-old, Gerber does not recognize much of her own adolescence in Susan and her precocious clique. But she certainly remembers feeling like a brave little adult at 17, in New York with her own apartment, too proud to call her mother when she couldn’t figure out how to turn on the dishwasher. In fact, her parents’ visibility may have acted as a safeguard against wildness. “I never wanted to embarrass them,” she recalls. “I never wanted to be that child coming in and ruining all the hard work they’ve done. I wasn’t a partier in high school. My mom was valedictorian, so I was like, Okay, well then me too. I was the student that was like, ‘You forgot to assign homework!’ That didn’t make me very popular. Really I was thinking, This is temporary. I don’t want to do anything that will potentially mess up my life and career. I always had big dreams. But you watch The Shards, and it makes you long for a time when you weren’t on your phone and where you could get into a little bit of trouble without it being on the internet the next day.”

Modeling was the path laid out for her, but Gerber always wanted to be an actor, and she has applied herself with characteristic gusto. She has studied Meisner and Strasberg. Last spring, while her peers were at Paris Fashion Week, she was playing an emotionally brittle young woman in Will Arbery’s Evanston Salt Costs Climbing at the 99-seat Matrix Theatre in West Hollywood. “My character is struggling with suicidal thoughts every night, and then I’d walk out and people are holding pictures of me posing naked as a teenager, asking me to sign them,” she remembers. “It’s like, I want to bleed out for people, and then I’m sort of hit in the face with this other thing.”

Her older brother Presley Gerber’s decade-long struggle with drug addiction appears to have provided a sort of foil as Kaia was discovering who she was. “When something like that happens in a family, it kind of levels everyone,” she explains. “I think that’s also why I started to self-​identify as the easy one and never wanted to ask for help. Because it felt like too much to have two children who were needing.” Last December, Presley opened up about his struggles in an Instagram video. Kaia, who has pursued multiple therapeutic modalities and is a champion of psychedelic therapy, in particular, is deeply proud of him. “My parents for most of our lives were very, very private and didn’t share anything—and now we have this absolute teacher, my brother, who says, ‘I’m gonna be very human for everyone.’ There’s only so much you can hide from the world. And trying to put a lid on something just makes the person feel like you’re ashamed of them.”

“I think doubting yourself a bit is healthy, no matter how good you are. You should always be a little nervous if you’re doing something worthwhile,” Gere says

Gerber, who quickly exhausted Malibu High School’s independent study track—available mainly to people on the surf team but also to the occasional supermodel—passed her high school equivalency exam at age 16. And so she loved having a chance to play homecoming queen and class president in The Shards. (Gerber confesses that she ran for president herself in the fifth grade and lost.) She remembers how excited she was when Murphy told her to ad-lib a speech for a school assembly. “I know it was, like, 200 background actors who were paid to cheer for me, but it didn’t matter,” she says. “I was thinking, I have been waiting for this moment my whole life.”

A few days after Gerber and I sit down, the Supreme Court throws out a lower court order calling for a new trial for the man convicted of the 1979 murder of Etan Patz. For children and parents of the 1980s, Patz’s disappearance—a six-year-old leaves his SoHo apartment and is never seen again—signaled a newly dangerous universe.

Ryan Murphy had Patz in mind when he read The Shards, whose tense ambiance is rooted in the real-life paranoia of Southern California at the dawn of the ’80s, a golden age of serial murder. The Night Stalker, the Hillside Stranglers, the Toolbox Killers, the Freeway Killer, and the Golden State Killer held the region in their grips, and yet in a certain milieu, at least, teenagers had rarely enjoyed so much freedom. “I never saw my parents,” Murphy recalls of his own childhood in Indiana in the 1970s. “We ran around like wild children. Then everything changed. The year The Shards is set, 1981, was arguably the most important year of my life. I was a sophomore in high school. I was struggling with my sexuality. I lost my virginity, and, in July of 1981, in The New York Times there was the first announcement of AIDS. That was the year that I linked sexuality with the threat of death, as so many gay men did. I remember asking Bret, ‘Is the Trawler really AIDS? Is HIV the real monster here?’ He just smiled and said, ‘My work is open to interpretation.’ ”

If Love Story is a meditation on life pre-9/11, The Shards is its pre-AIDS corollary. The material struck a deep chord in Murphy, who shared with his young cast his own experience growing up in the wake of Studio 54’s decadence and on the cusp of AIDS. “That’s such an important aspect of the book,” he explains, “this idea that there was suddenly a price to be paid for the joy and freedom of a beautiful adolescence. The ultimate bogeyman of my childhood was AIDS, so I really tried to put that in the show. But I wasn’t really prepared for how emotional I got when I directed it. I was shocked by how many times I would read a line or hear a song and burst into tears. I was always feeling the trauma of my youth.”

It was a look backward for Murphy, but also a reflection on the ills of contemporary life, especially for the young. Murphy, a parent to three children, the oldest of whom is 13, tells me, “There’s something about The Shards that says: Maybe the world was better when it was pre-digital.” He made his cast leave their phones in their trailers for hours in the hope that they might build connections. By all accounts it was successful: Gere and Gerber say that the cast has remained uncommonly close. (The night before our trip to the museum, the two were dancing at Joyface in the East Village until 3 a.m.)

Though he met his girlfriend of the last year and a half on Hinge, Gere does not use social media. Gerber has found her way out of the dark corners of the internet that used to preoccupy her. “You’d read something nice about yourself,” she says, “and then scroll and find something that’s going to obliterate you. But it learns you very well. Now my TikTok is kind of a pleasant place: It’s cooking videos and fishing-gear reviews and old men singing folk songs.”

Murphy thinks that Gere will be a big star in spite of himself. “He has a quality that I like in an actor, which is a real sense of mystery. He has no interest in being famous. He’s interested in the work of acting, and I love that about him. Kaia is so knowing. She’s been around the block, and although she reads more than anyone I’ve ever met in my life, she is also so pop-culture savvy. Homer is nothing like that. I think he’ll stay pure.” To that end, after shooting Oliver Stone’s new film, White Lies, in June, Gere headed into a 10-day Vipassana, or silent meditation, retreat in central Massachusetts. He has no other projects in the pipeline, and his agent understood that he would really and truly not be checking his phone. Before he went out of pocket, though, he learned that still images from Euphoria in which he is wearing nothing but underwear had gone viral. The internet, it turned out, was busy praising the soft contours of his physique (some called it “natural,” others dubbed it a “dad bod”).

Gerber wishes she could be synonymous with her work, a trick some screen stars, such as her idol Gena Rowlands, managed. “To me that’s the ultimate flex”

“The fact that I’m apparently a body-positivity icon has opened my eyes to the absurdity of the media,” he tells me later by text (though my sense is that his eyes were already wide open). Gerber, whose body has been sliced and diced by the media for a decade, found it all kind of wonderful.

“Everyone’s being like, ‘This is so sexy.’ And I think that rocks,” Gerber says. “We’re clearly in one of those cycles right now where people are very, very, very thin. As someone who’s been thin most of my life, I’ve always been compared against my mom—like, What’s wrong with Kaia? I’m so jealous of my mom’s body. I would have loved to be born with boobs and a butt. People have always commented on my body, which is hard because I’m not always ready to comment on my own body, you know? I’ve had disordered eating in my life. People are like, ‘You look terrible,’ and it doesn’t exactly make you go, ‘Oh, good. Let me get over this mental illness then!’ Negativity has never saved someone’s life.”

Having had a string of famous, older boyfriends since she was a teenager, Gerber has grown a thick skin. She has been dating the actor and musician Lewis Pullman, the son of Bill Pullman, for nearly two years and calls it the healthiest and most adult relationship of her life. “There are so few things you get to protect as a famous person, and being defined by who you date when you’re 18 is something I find challenging,” she says. “I think I’ve been labeled in ways that are quite misogynistic: serial dater, slut, greedy. My mom is always like, Just don’t make the same mistake twice. And I’m pretty good at not. I think the ultimate goal is that your relationship doesn’t change you, that you’re not code switching between relationship, friendship, professional life. I would love to always feel like me, and in this relationship I’m having the pleasure of doing that.”

Gerber tends to speak with the wisdom of someone who has had to grow up both quickly and publicly. Right now she’s reading, for the second time, The Body Keeps the Score, the Dutch American psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s exploration of the relationship between trauma and attachment. Gerber volunteers at a trauma center where she hopes to be a thoughtful and informed presence rather than, as she puts it, “a shiny distraction.” She wishes she could be synonymous with her work, a trick some screen stars, such as her idol Gena Rowlands, managed. “To me that’s the ultimate flex. To me Mark Rylance is one of the greatest actors of all time, and he shows up at Cannes wearing, like, sandals and cargo shorts. I have sort of succumbed to the fact that that will never be in the cards for me.”

For a person who has always felt insecure—a fact she is reluctant to acknowledge because she knows that pretty people don’t get much sympathy for their soft spots—she has never been more comfortable looking at herself in the mirror. Gerber and Gere watched the pilot of The Shards together: fun for her, harrowing for him. (“I can’t watch myself,” he says. “It’s a whole thing.”) They have talked about what to expect from a knives-out viewing public that might think, Here is peak nepo baby.

“I’ve only ever been a nepo baby, and I’ve only ever benefited in my career from it,” Gerber says. “But I also find myself doing it to other nepo babies, thinking, like, Okay, show me why you deserve this job. I said to Homer—because the concept is daunting to him, having lived as an adult so far without that perception, whereas I sort of went through it when I wasn’t fully sentient—I said to him, ‘Homer, unfortunately with this show, it’s not like you’re just any unknown actor and people will judge you as an unknown actor. But what that’s done for me is make me want to work harder.’ ”

Gere has a stutter, which he has learned to mask following years of speech therapy in middle school and a decade of practice since then. In that premonitory moment when he feels he is about to get stuck on a word, he pivots. “What I do is, I’ll change the word at the last minute,” he explains, “so if I’m going to stutter on rock, I’ll switch it to stone. I’m constantly playing a game of cat and mouse with my own mind.” Despite the wish for a quiet life, for the monastery or the mountaintop, like Robert Mallory, Gere seems to have a talent for finding himself in the center of the image. He would never call it star quality, though others might.

“I’m a very self-critical guy who would like to believe that my career’s going well for all the wrong reasons,” he says. “But the more success I have, the harder it becomes to believe that. I think doubting yourself a little bit is very healthy, no matter how good you are. At anything. You should always be a little nervous if you’re doing something worthwhile.”

In this story: hair, Guido Palau; makeup, Pat McGrath; manicurist, Jin Soon Choi; tailor, Carol Ai at Carol Ai Studio Tailors.

Produced by PRODn.

Via: Vogue