Richard Gere on a bench in Riverside Park for filming Asymmetry

It's July 2, 2026. Thursday afternoon. In Riverside Park — the long, narrow strip of green that separates Manhattan's Upper West Side from the Hudson River — Richard Gere is sitting on a bench. Next to him: Diana Silvers, 28 years old, laughing. Cameras rolling. The scene they're filming is the first meeting between Ezra and Alice. The filming of Asymmetry has begun.

The first images came from Riverside Park, where Gere and Silvers were photographed on a bench for People Magazine — the pivotal scene in which Ezra and Alice first meet, described in the production notes as Central Park. The two parks sit side by side in the Upper West Side, the neighbourhood that runs as a thread through Lisa Halliday's novel: pre-war apartment buildings, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, literary prizes gathering dust, a comfortable distance from the rest of the world.

Asymmetry is based on Lisa Halliday's debut novel from 2018 — a book The New Yorker called a literary phenomenon, that Barack Obama put on his annual reading list, that the New York Times named among the fifteen most significant novels by women shaping contemporary fiction. It tells the story of Ezra, a world-renowned 70-year-old author, and Alice, a young editorial assistant, whose moment of eye contact in Central Park pulls them both into a secret, life-changing relationship.

People Magazine // Deadline // Screen Daily // Primetimer