Gerard Butler
Gerard Butler
Gerard James Butleris a Scottish actor who has appeared on film, stage, and television. After studying law, Butler turned to acting in the mid-1990s with small roles in productions such as Mrs Brown, the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, and Tale of the Mummy. In 2000, he starred as Dracula in the horror film Dracula 2000 with Christopher Plummer and Jonny Lee Miller. The following year, he played Attila the Hun in the miniseries Attila...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth13 November 1969
CityPaisley, Scotland
When I'm making a movie, it's making use of my creative juices, and it fills me up with what really is - I think my purpose here is to tell stories.
Funnily enough, when I originally went in for my screen test, that set was already built.
I know I have within myself... a side of solitude. I think people who know me can see, but people who just meet me can't because I'm generally very fun and gregarious. I love to spend a lot of time on my own. I can seriously go into my own head and often love to let myself travel where I don't know where I'm going. I always felt that that was his kind of form of escape, in a way.
I was amazed and upset by the looks I got just walking around the studio... It illuminates the ugliness and the beauty that exists within each of us, and that's what this story represents to me.
I went from somebody who didn't sing to somebody who didn't speak.
My manager and my agents, they go over my contracts.
Sometimes along the way in my life I don't want a smart woman right now, I want a dumb woman. But then you think, 'That doesn't work, now I want a smart woman.' Then you get a smart woman and you go, 'No, that doesn't work.' So it's just killing me right now.
In actual fact, I wanted to be an actor, but I was a lawyer, and I was a week away from qualifying and was fired. And that's the day I made an announcement: "Hey, for seven years, you thought I was going to be a lawyer. Well, I'm not. I've just lost my job, and I'm packing my bags and moving to London tomorrow to be an actor."
Whenever I watched this movie ["How to Train Your Dragon"], I thought, "That's where I want to be. I want to be up in that sky. I want to be flying through the clouds and be living in that environment." So I think if I had a dragon, I would spend most of my time up in the air all over the place and taking in this beautiful planet.
Iceland is 50 percent Celtic blood, from the females that they stole from us, which is why our country has only got dogs left. It was a joke! I'll never be let back in Scotland again!
One thing I've learned as an actor as well as a producer is to trust my own instinct. When I first started acting I would sometimes have ideas about certain things, whether it's a scene, or a character or certain dialogue, that wouldn't be followed. I was never in a position to have the power to press the matter. Sometimes it wasn't even about my character. But I'd watch the movie afterwards and think I was right.
Theres a great sense of achievement, testosterone, fun, being able to live out your masculinity when you play an action role or an action-adventure or a real tough-guy role.
My Range Rover is great for LA. You can take surfboards on it and stick some bikes in the back. And if you kidnap people you could tie them up in the back, there's space for your chloroform...
I was born in Glasgow. But my family is pretty much from a little town called Paisley, famous for its cotton mills and paisley pattern.