In his bestselling 2024 book, The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that today’s teenagers—growing up in a world shaped by smartphones—miss out on the kind of chance encounters and unstructured experiences that help build daring, adaptable, and independent adults. Haidt, who is the same age as writer Bret Easton Ellis, looks back fondly on many of the freedoms that Ellis captures in his 2023 novel, The Shards. But probably not all of them. While Haidt laments that today’s young people lack what he calls “free play”—aimless, unsupervised time—Ellis’s young characters play with a wildness that borders on reckless. The kids in The Shards might have benefited from a watchful eye now and then, if only their parents weren’t off vacationing in Europe indefinitely.
This month, Ryan Murphy brings his adaptation of The Shards to FX. For those still caught up in the ’90s nostalgia of Love Story—his series about the courtship, marriage, and tragic end of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette—this is another chance to travel back in time, to an even more analog world with even tighter jeans. Ellis’s story is set in Los Angeles in 1981, where a group of seniors at an elite private school has their lives disrupted by a new student with a mysterious past. These kids are fast—cruising through the canyons in luxury cars, snorting cocaine, throwing lavish parties at their parents’ houses, showing off, hooking up, hitting clubs, and hanging out at the country club. All the while, a serial killer known as the Trawler is targeting young women from the city’s wealthy neighborhoods.
The show’s cast is led by Igby Rigney, who plays Bret (essentially Ellis’s younger self), an aspiring writer who is closeted and 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 newcomer, who give the show’s opening credits their spark. Gerber’s mother is, of course, Cindy Crawford, and Gere’s father is Richard Gere; together, they were one of the iconic couples of the early ’90s. (In fact, 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-generation casting choice. 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-covered fortress on a quiet triangular block in Long Island City, Queens. It’s a meaningful place for him, not just because it holds a striking collection of the Japanese American artist’s abstract carved-stone and basalt sculptures. Gere, who majored in visual arts at Brown, first got to know the museum when he made a detailed replica of one of Isamu Noguchi’s paper lamps for an architecture class. It’s an unusually hot late-spring afternoon, and he’s wearing blue USA rugby shorts he thrifted last week in Rome, a T-shirt he took from his dad’s closet that was a long-ago gift from Bruce Weber, and a beat-up New York Yankees cap. This is his first interview, he tells me. He admits he’s nervous and adds that someone advised him to avoid sarcasm because it doesn’t come across well in print.
“I just want to appear likable,” he says sincerely. “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 think I understand the game a little more than someone who has done as little work as I have should.”I grew up in the most ordinary situation you could imagine, given who my father is. I didn’t grow up in the entertainment industry at all. I had never set foot on a professional film set until last summer.
Gere and Gerber couldn’t have come to The Shards with more different backgrounds. Gerber started modeling at age 10 and walked a major runway at 16. She had already appeared in two of Ryan Murphy’s previous productions, along with other TV and film work, and Murphy had her in mind for the role of Susan—the beautiful, smart student body president—as soon as The Shards got the green light. Gere’s path to acting was more roundabout, though maybe it was always going to happen. He grew up in Westchester, New York, with his father, Richard Gere, and his mother, actress Carey Lowell. Even 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 raising his family away from Hollywood. Upstate, Homer was essentially raised as an only child, even though he’s actually one of seven siblings in a complicated blended family: he has stepbrothers aged 36 and 40, a half-sister aged 36, a stepbrother aged 13, and two half-brothers aged six and seven. On his mother’s side, he’s the youngest; on his father’s side, he’s 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 my whole childhood, people kept asking me, ‘Are you going to be an actor when you grow up?’ And I’d think, ‘Hell no.’ I did well in school, and my parents never pressured me. Acting was always over there”—he gestures to the side—”it was something other people did. There are a million ways to live a happy life, you know? And acting is 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 all over the internet the next day,” Gerber says.
In college, Gere switched majors several times before realizing he enjoyed making art. During the pandemic, he took a gap year, driving across the country and falling deeply in love with the outdoors. Sport climbing is Gere’s passion. He loves the challenge of solving difficult problems in nature in very controlled ways. Climbing runs in his blood: his maternal grandfather, geologist James Lowell, has climbed every 14,000-foot mountain in Colorado, and at 26, Gere has made it up 11 of the 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. “Suddenly I was part of the film community on campus,” he remembers. “And from then on, every semester, that was my main focus. I was trying to make sketches with my friends, or you know, how many sets can I be on? Can I do production design for you? Can I help with location scouting? I just wanted to be part of a team.” Gere graduated in 2024, despite a concussion from playing club soccer that made him miss his final exams. After spending some time at home with his mother in Katonah, New York, and not seeing a clear path forward, he spent a few months in Colorado, camping, hiking, and climbing. That’s when he got an unexpected call from a talent manager who had seen one of his student films and wanted to know if he was interested in representation. “I thought, okay, maybe this is a sign.”
Up to that point, Gere’s exposure to Los Angeles had been through Ed Limato, his father’s legendary agent, who would pull 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 announce his arrival. Homer and his father haven’t talked much about acting. Instead, they tend to discuss the politics of the set and the downsides of fame. “I’m an introvert who has developed enough social skills to get by,” he says. “I think myDad is the same. Gere’s parents have both had long-standing connections to Tibetan Buddhism, and its teachings have left a deep impression on him. “Having a father who meditates—especially compassion meditation—for an hour a day over the last 50 years definitely affects you,” he says. “It gives you a glimpse into the real inner work 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 point, isn’t it? You’re never a finished product. For me, the biggest lesson from Buddhism is the basic attitude of not harming others. It’s like, you want to wish everyone the best, whatever that looks like for them. No matter who they are—someone you like or someone you don’t—it just makes life a lot easier to get through.”
He auditioned for two series in the spring of 2025, Euphoria and The Shards, and he was in India with his father for the Dalai Lama’s birthday celebration when he got a call from Murphy’s team asking him to come in 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 becomes 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 experienced member of the Shards cast. 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 I was born into, so I never experienced what it was like to become famous,” Gerber explains. “I kind of thought my upbringing was as anonymous as 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’re sitting at the Chateau Marmont, a place that holds sentimental value for Gerber since it housed the writers room for The Shards and was the setting for cast dinners led by Murphy, almost like a parent figure. 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 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 said, ‘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 mostly exists outside the bubble of her Malibu childhood. “Unfortunately, all the things 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 graduation. 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 doesn’t 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—Her visibility may have protected her from going off the rails. “I never wanted to embarrass them,” she recalls. “I never wanted to be that kid who comes in and ruins all the hard work they’ve done. I wasn’t a partier in high school. My mom was valedictorian, so I thought, okay, I’ll be that too. I was the student who’d say, ‘You forgot to assign homework!’ That didn’t make me popular. Honestly, I was thinking, this is temporary. I don’t want to do anything that could mess up my life and career. I always had big dreams. But you watch The Shards, and it makes you miss a time when you weren’t glued to your phone and could get into a little trouble without it being all over the internet the next day.”
Modeling was the path set out for her, but Gerber always wanted to act, and she’s thrown herself into it with her usual energy. She’s studied Meisner and Strasberg techniques. Last spring, while her peers were at Paris Fashion Week, she was playing a fragile young woman in Will Arbery’s Evanston Salt Costs Climbing at the 99-seat Matrix Theatre in West Hollywood. “My character deals with suicidal thoughts every night, and then I’d walk out and people are holding up pictures of me posing naked as a teenager, asking me to sign them,” she remembers. “It’s like, I want to pour my heart out for people, and then I get slapped in the face with this other thing.”
Her older brother Presley Gerber’s decade-long battle with drug addiction seems to have shaped Kaia as she figured out who she was. “When something like that happens in a family, it kind of brings everyone down to the same level,” she explains. “I think that’s also why I started to see myself as the easy one and never wanted to ask for help. It felt like too much to have two kids who needed support.” Last December, Presley opened up about his struggles in an Instagram video. Kaia, who has tried various therapies and is a big supporter of psychedelic therapy, is incredibly proud of him. “My parents were very private for most of our lives and didn’t share anything—and now we have this amazing teacher, my brother, who says, ‘I’m going to be really human for everyone.’ There’s only so much you can hide from the world. And trying to cover something up just makes the person feel like you’re ashamed of them.”
“I think doubting yourself a little is healthy, no matter how good you are. You should always be a bit nervous if you’re doing something meaningful,” Gere says.
Gerber, who quickly finished Malibu High School’s independent study program—mostly meant for surf team members but also open to the occasional supermodel—passed her high school equivalency exam at 16. So she loved getting to play homecoming queen and class president in The Shards. (Gerber admits she ran for president herself in fifth grade and lost.) She remembers how thrilled she was when Murphy told her to improvise 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’ve 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 kids and parents in the 1980s, Patz’s disappearance—a six-year-old leaves his SoHo apartment and is never seen again—marked a newly dangerous world.
Ryan Murphy had Patz in mind when he read The Shards, whose tense mood is rooted in the real-life paranoia of Southern California at the start of the ’80s, a golden age of serial killers. The Night Stalker, the Hillside Stranglers, the Toolbox Killers, the Freeway Killer, and the Golden State Killer had the region in their grip, aAnd yet, in certain circles 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, The New York Times published the first announcement of AIDS. That was the year 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 before 9/11, The Shards is its pre-AIDS counterpart. 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 brink 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 unusually 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). GerbeShe’s had her body picked apart by the media for ten years, but she found it all kind of wonderful.
“Everyone’s 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.”
RIGHT THIS WAY
Gerber in Chloé and an Omega watch. Gere in Prada.
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 premonitAt the moment he feels a word slipping away, he quickly changes course. “What I do is, I’ll swap the word at the last second,” he says. “So if I’m about to stutter on ‘rock,’ I’ll switch it to ‘stone.’ It’s a constant game of cat and mouse with my own mind.” Even though he longs for a quiet life—maybe a monastery or a mountaintop, like Robert Mallory—Gere seems to have a knack for landing right in the spotlight. He’d never call it star quality, though others might.
“I’m a very self-critical guy who’d like to think my career is going well for all the wrong reasons,” he admits. “But the more success I have, the harder it is to believe that. A little self-doubt is healthy, no matter how good you are at something. You should always feel a bit nervous if you’re doing something that matters.”
In this story: hair by Guido Palau; makeup by Pat McGrath; manicure by Jin Soon Choi; tailoring by Carol Ai at Carol Ai Studio Tailors. Produced by PRODn.
The September issue is out now.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the Vogue September 2026 cover story featuring Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere
General The Interview
1 Who are Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere
They are the adult children of two of Hollywoods most iconic stars Kaia is the daughter of Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber and shes a successful model and actress Homer is the son of Richard Gere and Carey Lowell and hes an actor and filmmaker
2 What is The Shards they are talking about
The Shards is the title of their new collaborative projecta short film that Kaia directed and Homer stars in Its a psychological drama that explores themes of identity family legacy and the pressure of growing up in the spotlight
3 Why are they doing a joint interview for Vogue
They are promoting The Shards together The interview is their first major joint press appearance and they used it to address their friendship their creative partnership and the public scrutiny theyve faced
4 How did they become friends
They met through mutual friends in the New York creative scene a few years ago They bonded over their shared and often isolating experience of being nepo babies and trying to forge their own paths in the industry
5 What did they say about their famous parents
They were very open and affectionate Kaia spoke about her mother Cindys work ethic and how she taught her to be disciplined but also to have her own identity Homer talked about his father Richards wisdom and how he encouraged him to be an artist rather than just a celebrity
The Nepo Baby Narrative Proving Doubters Wrong
6 What is the nepo baby label and how do they feel about it
Its the term for people who benefit from having famous parents in their industry They acknowledged that they have immense privilege and that they cant change how they were born However they both expressed frustration that the label often discredits their actual work and effort
7 How are they proving the doubters wrong
They arent trying to escape their last names they are trying to outwork them Kaia is taking on serious complex directorial roles and Homer is