Richard Gere, 76, gets intimate with co-star Diana Silvers, 28, as they film controversial age gap romance

Richard Gere was spotted this week in New York, filming a romantic scene with his co-star Diana Silvers for their age gap love story Asymmetry.

Gere, who turns 77 at the end of the month, has been cast in the movie as a revered author called Ezra while Silvers, 28, plays a literary assistant called Alice.

The film is based on an acclaimed 2018 roman a clef of the same name by Lisa Halliday, who herself as a young woman became romantically involved with Portnoy's Complaint author Philip Roth, an exalted literary lion 43 years her senior.

In real life, Gere is married to a Spanish publicist called Alejandra Silva, his third wife, who at the age of 43 is more than three decades younger than he is.

Meanwhile Silvers is closer in age to Gere's son Homer, 26, who is starring on the new Ryan Murphy series The Shards alongside his fellow 'nepo baby' Kaia Gerber, 24, the daughter of one of Gere's previous wives, Cindy Crawford.

Silvers and Gere were glimpsed this week filming a sequence that saw their characters indulge in an ice cream date on a sunlit park bench.

The Daily Mail has contacted Gere and Silvers' representatives for comment. 

In the novel, the two leads meet over Mister Softee cones in Central Park, suggesting the scene being filmed this week might be their introduction.

According to the film's logline, the pair 'create a private world just for two' after their chance encounter leads to the flowering of an illicit relationship. 

'Ezra, famous for his audacious work, finds someone with whom he can be openly vulnerable, and Alice finds the courage to explore her own aspirations as a writer. Until it is all put at risk when their secret relationship is exposed.'

Asymmetry is written, directed and produced by Edward Zwick, who won a best picture Oscar for his role as a producer on Shakespeare in Love.

As a director, his filmography includes the 1980s romantic comedy About Last Night led by Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, as well as the 1994 western Legends of the Fall starring by Brad Pitt and the 2003 Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai.

Gere and his latest wife were family friends for years before they exchanged vows in 2018 on his massive ranch in upstate New York, since when they have welcomed two sons into the world - Alexander, seven, and James, six.

At the time that they first struck up their romance in 2015, Gere and Silva were both in the process of divorcing their previous spouses.

The celebrity Buddhist was disentangling himself from his union to Bond girl Carey Lowell - Homer's mother - while Silva's prior husband was Govind Friedland, whose father is the billionaire mining tycoon Robert Friedland. 

Silva has recalled that she was a 'little girl' when Gere first met her whilst borrowing a boat from her father Ignacio Silva, the former vice president of Real Madrid FC.

Their paths crossed again in 2014 in Positano, where she was running a hotel, and at that point she 'reminded him' of their first introduction.

'Our karma brought us together as soon as we saw each other because we've known each other over the course of many lives - that's how we both feel anyway,' she said. 

In reference to the decades-wide chasm between them, Silva has remarked: 'I'm not ignoring our age difference and what it means to be with a Hollywood star, but when there's such a strong karmic energy, the problems disappear.' 

By contrast, Gere's first wife Cindy Crawford, who was married to him from 1991 to 1995, has argued that their 15-year age gap opened a gulf between their sensibilities.

Crawford and Gere were introduced in the late 1980s at a barbecue hosted by the legendary fashion photographer Herb Ritts.

At the time, Crawford was 22 and her modeling career was on the ascent, while Gere was 37 and had already established himself as an A-list film star.

'I think a lot of what happened with Richard and I was that I was still 22 and at 22 - as a young woman - I was kind of still figuring out who I was and what I wanted to be and he was already 37,' she told Oprah Winfrey in a 2013 interview on Master Class.

'So in some ways, he knew that I was still growing and changing. I just didn't want to hear it from him because at 22 you think you know everything. You think you're already formed. And then you realize, 10 years later, that they were totally right.'