Interview: Richard Gere's role as a fraudster is a far cry from his sincerity in real life

Richard Gere does not lie awake at night pondering his tally of Academy Award nominations (none), or even why he has received such a startling lack of critical kudos. He lies awake worrying about American politics, any of his myriad humanitarian projects and, probably mostly, routine family stuff. Even America's most famous Buddhist is surely not so enlightened that he has eliminated worry from his life altogether, though he conveys that impression when he arrives an hour or so late to our meeting without explanation or apology. And he has a sort of calming effect, all twinkly-eyed and well-tailored as he is. Can this really be a man two years away from a free bus pass?

In two years Gere will turn 60, with a full slate of eclectic projects in his immediate wake. Next year he will reunite with Diane Lane, his Unfaithful co-star who cheated on Gere as her husband in that film but will pay him some attention in their next. Nights in Rodanthe will see Gere and Lane playing out the same sort of scenes that made him famous when American Gigolo was released in 1980. Two years later, An Officer and a Gentleman was to Gere's career what Top Gun was to Tom Cruise's, though the rest of the Eighties weren't kind to him. The Nineties were better, but the new millennium arrived in appalling cinematic fashion for Gere, playing lover to a dying Winona Ryder who looked more like his daughter in Autumn in New York.

Things have improved since with The Hoax, another step in a more critically receptive direction. The New York Times termed Gere "brilliant" and the performance "one of his best since middle age". He deserves real credit for making us care about an absolute scoundrel whose personal and professional behaviour is roundly egregious. Disarmingly appealing, and making almost ridiculously implausible claims, his Clifford Irving is an author, his fame in decline, who engineers the sort of scam unthinkable in today's technological times: he announces to a top publisher that famed mogul recluse Howard Hughes has appointed him official biographer. In so doing, Irving bilks the publisher of a million dollars, shreds Life magazine's credibility and lands a two-year jail sentence for fraud.

"For an actor, who is lying most of the time anyway, something like this is great. Clifford Irving had his own issues, issues we all have, but then those resonated into the much larger universe – Nixon, the Supreme Court, Watergate. Bigger stuff. I thought that was really interesting."

Gere likes to have his say on bigger stuff. He was famously banned from the Oscars after speaking out on stage against the Chinese government in 1993, though his apparently culturally inappropriate behaviour with Shilpa Shetty in India recently merited significantly more global coverage than the comments that reportedly got him banned from China for a period of time. Predictably little of the Shetty hoop-la coverage mentioned that the pair were attending an HIV-awareness rally organised by one of Gere's Indian charities.

I expect Gere to be preachy, almost publicising his own causes and passions. But he is not. He does, however, mention George W Bush plenty of times, in a measured but demonstrably vitriolic tone.

"We have a President now who is clearly a liar. The Vice-President lies constantly. We have a Secretary of State who lies, a Secretary of Defense who lies and an Attorney General who lies. This is insane. The secret government that they have put together is worse than most anything in the former Soviet Union. It's unthinkable."

He can make such points in the name of movie promotion because of obvious parallels between the world of The Hoax – which implicates the former President Richard Nixon in a previously unreported scandal with the Vietnam War as backdrop – and that of his country's current administration. "There are all sorts of parallels between that time and now. Look at Vietnam and the Iraq War. A lie got us into Vietnam, and another got us into Iraq."

Seeing Gere with curly brown hair, not to mention an overly prominent forehead for which he shaved his hairline, is initially jarring. " Clifford has a high forehead, which gave him a kind of professorial look. He's an Upper East Side New York Jew so he kind of had to have that represented. But there really wasn't too much pressure for me to look like him exactly because nobody really knows what he looks like."

Gere did, of course. He had done hours of research, poring over television footage, print coverage of Irving's case and chatting up friends of Irving's. Irving agreed to a meeting with Gere, then cancelled, causing the actor no particular chagrin. "He's obviously a highly manipulative person and I had a good sense of what I wanted to do with the role. I don't think this movie is pretending to be a documentary on him."

None the less, he had a prosthetic nose made to approximate better the botched nose-job Irving could never quite disguise. "That was a kind of Richard III thing for me. The doctors made a mess of a job on Irving's nose so there was this exterior flaw which kind of indicated his interior flaws. For me it's a slightly aggressive thing. That something on your face is always there."

The Shetty clinch aside, there has been nothing of late in Gere's life that has merited any tabloid frenzy. He lives in upstate New York with Carey Lowell, his actress wife of five years, and their seven-year-old son, Homer. He is by all accounts a happy family man, albeit one who travels extensively in support of his assorted causes. His latest Indian project is one providing micro-insurance.

"We have come up with a programme that covers people for most medical problems for 120 rupees a year [about £1.50]. This immediately removes people from a cycle of debts. So many people in these countries have debt because they needed to pay medical bills for a family member. It's incredible how they can get into debt for generations just because someone got sick."

Gere's American projects include Healing the Divide, an organisation active in social and political milieus, one of which involves work to improve inner-city areas producing a disproportionately high number of criminals. Internationally he is also an active campaigner for Middle-Eastern peace.

"There's nothing on this planet that doesn't resonate through all of us immediately. I do lots of Aids work and if a mutation of a virus appears in a brothel in Bangkok, the next day it's in New York. And if you can solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, well, 95 per cent of the planet's problems go away."

Of the planet's more fashionable causes, he says he is heartened by the groundswell of enthusiasm for the environment. "There really is some kind of awakening that seems to be happening. Look at how many magazines and newspapers are talking about the planet's environmental issues. They are practically showing us how to be more green in ways that are truly accessible to all of us. At all levels people need to keep communicating and talking. We all have the same problems but we also have the same solutions and we can do it together."

Gere likes to explain that he does not delineate between work and life. "I don't do my thing, punch out and go and do my life. It's all life, all of it. There's not a moment that needs to be wasted in the whole process. Making a movie is a job but it's no different from my kid being given a project in class: 'Let's make a village out of paper. OK, where will the river be?' It's all the same. It's all fun. And the better people you have, who have a sense of joy and play about them, the more fun it is."

Presumably he would include this film's delicious partner in crime, Alfred Molina, in such a category? "Oh, Alfred is the top. There is no one better than him. No one nicer than him. This is a love story between two men, basically, and he's the best lover I've ever had."

'The Hoax' opens on 3 August