Brad Pitt and Ryan Phillippe were reportedly offered Paul before the role was made French for exoticism; everyone who likes the movie likes Olivier Martinez.
Cheating with someone of a different nationality might feel like an 80 percent cheat; another white guy would have hit Gere harder.
Jennifer Lopez was offered the role and turned it down because the script was not all the way there, and after Lane's nomination said she wanted to shoot her toe off.
Speaking as a J.Lo actor truther, one participant says she made the right choice: it is a particular movie-star part that works with Diane Lane or Foster, and J.Lo in the suburbs married to Gere would never stop being J.Lo.
The film never shows how the couple met; audiences may know Gere and Lane worked together before, and there is a wish to see Gere pick someone up without paying.
Lyne cast Lane after seeing A Walk on the Moon, calling her sympathetic when so many sexy women are tough and hard.
Early-2000s SoHo is liked, as a substitute for Fatal Attraction's meatpacking district.
Paul Martel's apartment is liked; research says Lyne pumped in so much smoke for the sunlit musty look that everyone filming there for a month got sick.
The apartment matches the Nine and a Half Weeks and Fatal Attraction style, and Lyne is said to live in one of those apartments, known from an interview with him.
The score is offered next and mocked: it feels cheaty, is likened to imagined lyrics about loins, is questioned as selling tissues or spritzers, and is said to sound like Claire of the Moon, one of the worst lesbian movies ever made.
Any scene where someone tells an older, scary-looking man to follow their wife is always good, made better because it is Uncle June.
Connie finding the photos in Edward's jacket at the dry cleaners is liked, with Lyne spinning the machines while her friend talks unheard.
A question: who hires a detective, keeps the proof photos in his jacket, and leaves it for his wife to take to the dry cleaners after meticulously cleaning the apartment for 19 hours? This is flagged for picking nits.
A lesson that aged well: keep French guys away from your wife; who has replaced the sexy Frenchman is debated, with Italians or a Spaniard floated.
Olivier Martinez does not do it for one participant, while that participant's wife and mother rate him 10 out of 10, prompting a Venn diagram joke about what gay men and straight women like.
