“Our parents? Were married?” Kaia Gerber said sarcastically, feigning shock on a bright blue carpet while celebrating Ryan Murphy’s new show “The Shards” on Monday night in Manhattan. “That’s our bit.”
Despite her rapport with her castmate Homer Gere now, she insists she never met the young actor, whose father, Richard Gere, was married to her mother, Cindy Crawford, from 1991 to 1995.
On the show, a prep-school thriller based on Bret Easton Ellis’s 2023 novel about teenage life in 1980s Los Angeles, Gere and Gerber play high schoolers in a stylized version of the city where their parents hung out — and met.
Still, Murphy was sensitive about the history.
“I had a talk with Kaia and Homer before I cast them,” Murphy said. “I asked: ‘How do you feel about this? What’s your sensitivity? Do you have any thoughts?’ Because I cared about them,” he said. “If one person had said no, I wouldn’t have done it.”
Gerber said her own upbringing was unlike the show’s world, where wealthy teenagers are left to their own devices to throw cocaine-fueled parties and speed down Mulholland Drive in their Porsches as a serial killer terrorizes the city.
“My L.A. teen experience was so different from what is depicted in the show,” Gerber said.
She believes the series taps into the teenage feeling of a world that has not yet shown you a lot of its dangers. “But our show starts to navigate those terrors that are lurking just beneath us,” she said.
She was primed to be a fan of Ellis, she said, who first captured the ennui of the city in his 1985 novel, “Less Than Zero.” He published that book, which is also about coming of age in a fast, drug-fueled lane of Los Angeles, at 21.
“I feel like growing up in L.A., there’s a trifecta of writers: Bret Easton Ellis, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz,” said Gerber, who runs the popular book club Library Science with Alyssa Reeder.
Murphy, too, had been a longtime fan of the author. Set in 1981, “The Shards” reminded him of his own teen years.
“When it became available, I literally pounced on it like a cat to catnip,” Murphy said. “I knew the songs, I knew the clothes, I knew everything because I had lived it. It was my time.”
Murphy said he loved the book’s references to Debbie Harry, his idol as a teenager, and songs like “Vienna,” by Ultravox; “Rapture,” by Blondie; and “Funkytown,” by Lipps Inc. — some of which made it into the show.
And while it was fun to revisit the era, it was also painful, Murphy said. While the AIDS crisis is not part of Ellis’s novel, Murphy was interested in that subtext as he was writing the show.
“I had my first date in February of 1981, and in July of 1981 came the story that there was a new disease,” Murphy said. “I grew up with that specter of all this intimacy with death.”
The guests attended a screening of the first episode at the SVA Theater in Chelsea, and then walked down the street to the Hotel Chelsea for a gathering filled with paraphernalia of the era: wayfarer-style sunglasses, MTV pins, View-Masters and Pat Benatar tapes.
After watching cast members snort cocaine, pop Klonopin pills and slam vodka sodas onscreen, the party felt mellow.
Gerber walked through the bar toward her parents, Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber. Igby Rigney, who plays a young fictionalized Ellis in the series, sipped a glass of water with an orange wedge. Hayes Warner, who plays Ellis’s girlfriend Debbie Schaffer, snapped a selfie with a disposable camera. Grace Gummer, who recently starred in Murphy’s “Love Story,” which depicts the tragic relationship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, drank a glass of red wine.
A few guests were dressed for the era, wearing side ponytails, glittery dresses and jeweled chokers. Jordan Roth, a theater producer who plays the assistant to a powerful Hollywood producer in the show, wondered if the series would fuel looks from the ’80s.
“Thank you Ryan Murphy,” Roth said. “‘Love Story’ got us our ’90s nostalgia, and ‘Shards’ brings us our ’80s nostalgia.”
