NEW Audio! Gerry interview with Ryan Seacrest
Gerry was interviewed this morning by Ryan Seacrest, you can listen to the interview here.
Category Archive: Gerry News
Gamer’s at the Farmer’s Market
Gamer’s at the Farmer’s Market
By Mali Elfman
Gamer Viral Promoters Getting Serious
Nothing like a bit of viral marketing at local Farmer’s Markets to get you in the mode for the bloody action film Gamer starring Gerard Butler, Michael C. Hall, Amber Valletta, and Alison Lohman. Peaches on one side, army boots on the other. Perfect fit really!
The film is set to be released this Friday, September 4th, and in honor of that they have a group of guys in “Gamer” attire, walking around with a poster for the film. At first it looked like the FBI was taking over, that is until they flashed Gerard Butler’s face.
If you’ve seen any of the Gamer guys in your area send in your photos or video at press@ucrave.com or leave a comment below and we’ll add them to the site! Bonus points if you can get one of them to pull a fake gun you!
For Butler, it’s all part of the game
For Butler, it’s all part of the game
August 30, 2009
BY CINDY PEARLMAN
He doesn’t have his movie star game on. Sex symbol Gerard Butler is hiding out on a hotel roof in Los Angeles when he’s spotted and asked to leave the premises.
Is this any way to treat someone who has ascended to the top of the the A-list in Hollywood? The star of the new “Gamer” (out Friday) isn’t being treated like a star. Try a trespasser.
The construction workers on the roof don’t really care about the guy on the cell phone trying to conduct an interview in private and elude the paparazzi who dream of finding him with Jennifer Aniston. In fact, the welders don’t even know it’s Butler. They think he’s just some guy trying to infiltrate their turf — or jump.
“Hang on. They are actually kicking me off the roof,” Butler says in an amused voice. Suggest that he try the movie-star thing by whipping off the sunglasses and the required baseball cap.
“I could have whipped off the glasses and said, ‘Look. See the face,’” he growls. “‘Let me stay. I was in “300″!’”
Coulda. Woulda. Shoulda.
His voice mellows. “Of course, I can’t ever do that because I just can’t get into the Hollywood thing. I’m a regular guy from Scotland. I’m a good little boy.”
Now hiding out in the hotel lounge, the regular guy who turns 40 this Nov. 13 says, “I’m still not very good at playing the movie-star attitude. It’s just not my thing. I don’t even get my buddies into clubs. … I could tell you a story about it … but I’d better not.”
He will talk about the rumors that he’s dating Jennifer Aniston, co-star of “The Bounty,” the movie he’s now shooting.
“I don’t even know what’s going on with these tales,” he says with a sigh. “My friends call me and say, ‘You’re on TV for dating someone and in the papers.’ I never see the TV. I never read the articles.
ollowing me 24-7. Savvy fans will notice I’ve essentially worn the same outfit in all my photos with Jen. They’re photos taken while we have been filming the movie. The paparazzi has come back again and again to take the same photo of us in the car.”
Butler has other issues with the photographers.
“In my private life, the paparazzi love to take photos of me with food falling out of my mouth,” he gripes. “Or even better, on the set. Once I hugged Jennifer and said, ‘Great scene.’ It made national news.”
The other day, he was sitting by himself at an L.A. sidewalk cafe.
“The paparazzi shot me for an hour eating my lunch. The photogs would keep their cameras down and then bring them up every time I would bring a forkful of salad into my mouth. Up and down. Up and down. Camera and fork. Fork and camera.
“It got to the point where I stopped eating because I thought, ‘No, I won’t give these bastards the satisfaction.’ But when someone would walk by my table and block me, I’d cram in five mouthfuls of salad. The photog would miss the shot and mouth, ‘Bastard.’”
In “Gamer,” he’s not easily messed with, either.
He plays Kable in the story set in a future world where humans control other humans in large masses in an online multiplayer gaming world.
“It’s a tough-guy role he was born to play,” says model turned actress Amber Valetta, his “Gamer” co-star. “It’s the action stuff that Gerry did so well in ‘300,’ but he’s also so appealing as a guy you want on your side in a crisis.”
Butler adds, “I’m amazed no one was killed making this movie because it felt very dangerous, but you see that onscreen.”
Yes, Butler put his now famed self on the line.
“I was hit by flying debris. I fell down stairs,” he says. “One day, I fell through a car, connected some flesh with jagged metal for real and scraped up my entire back.”
Butler compares his growing list of injuries to those of an athlete.
“Honestly, I’m like a football player at this point,” he says. “By the time I do hit 40, I will point out all my scars and say to friends, ‘This is the one from ‘Gamer.’… This is from ‘300.’ … For ‘Reign of Fire,’ I did a fire scene and coated my body with gel. I got second-degree burns on the back of my neck.”
Butler stars in the fall drama “Law Abiding Citizen” with Jamie Foxx and Oscar nominee Viola Davis.
“I had a scene where these flames crawl up a wall behind me. That was my scariest movie moment,” he admits. “I thought I was on fire and it felt like my entire body could burst into flames.”
Butler is also a producer on the film.
“I was heavily involved in the script writing,” he says. “I expected it to be a piece of s— and it turned out amazing.”
“Law Abiding Citizen” is about an everyman who takes justice into his own hands after a plea bargain sets the killers of his family free. He wants to knock off the district attorney who gave the killers their deal.
“It’s a real crowd pleaser, so scary and tense and just unexpected and surprising,” Butler says.
He does love that Hollywood surprises him.
For example, there were those bad reviews for his summer romantic comedy “The Ugly Truth.” They were followed by solid box-office receipts.
“I don’t think the reviewers were too happy with it, but the audience certainly loved it,” he says. “I was getting calls from my agent saying that the theaters were packed. Then I read these horrible reviews and said, ‘How did that happen?’”
Chalk up another charmed career twist for the native of Scotland who became famous playing King Leonidas in the 2006 hit “300.” Butler has also starred in “P.S. I Love You” (2007), “Nim’s Island” (2008) and “RocknRolla” (2008).
“Gamer,” “Law Abiding Citizen” and “The Bounty” might make him a bigger star, but Butler could use a little less attention. Right now, three girls are tracking him in the hotel lounge.
“The girls are trying to be cool about it,” he whispers into the phone. “But they’re listening to every word I say and keep following me each time I get up. Now, they’re looking up and smiling. In unison.”
At least, it’s a little recognition, but it won’t change his life even if the paparazzi have him linked to these girls by dusk.
“I know who I am, and now that I’ve come into my own that won’t change,” he says. “I would just like to get through an entire salad unnoticed.”
Perhaps he should go back on the roof.
Interview: Gerard Butler
Interview: Gerard Butler
August 31, 2009
By ALICE WYLLIE
GERARD BUTLER IS HAVING A little difficulty with his accent. The Paisley-born actor is in-between two roles, both of which call for a heavy American drawl, and it’s playing havoc with his normally soft Scottish burr. I meet the actor in his suite in the Dorchester Hotel in London where he’s doing back-to-back press for two films – The Ugly Truth and Gamer – and within 30 seconds I find myself commenting on the transatlantic twang he’s picked up.
“Normally, I’m worse than this,” he laughs, his voice trailing up like a question at the end of the word “normally”.
“I can’t go from thick Scottish into an American accent … but the second I land at Glasgow Airport, I walk out and I go to Starbucks and I go (he adopts a Brigadoon-worthy Scottish delivery], ‘Can I have a café latte please?’ and that’s it. I get straight back into it.”
More than 13 years after he was fired from Edinburgh law firm Morton Fraser a week before he was due to qualify, Butler is looking pretty content. He has homes in Los Angeles and New York and travels to Scotland regularly to visit his parents, who now live in Comrie.
The clean-living Hollywood lifestyle appears to suit him. At 39, he looks fit, healthy and, of course, devastatingly handsome. You might say that he’s bringing sexy back to a Hollywood more used to waxed chests and bleached teeth than masculine good looks worthy of the Scotch Beef man.
Wearing a pale blue V-neck T-shirt and jeans, and with tanned features, a smattering of perma-stubble, the hint of a grown-up six pack beneath his T-shirt, and a healthy growth of chest hair poking out of the top of it, it’s easy to see why he’s enjoying leading man status. And indeed why there’s a Facebook group devoted to him called “Gerard Butler is my husband … he just doesn’t know it yet”.
Such rugged good looks could easily have had him typecast in the rent-a-beefcake role, but Butler has enjoyed a fairly diverse selection of parts. He played the scarred hero in 2004’s Phantom of the Opera, the muscular leader of the Spartans in 2006’s 300, Hilary Swank’s dead husband in 2007’s PS I Love You, a chauvinistic shock jock in this year’s romantic comedy The Ugly Truth and is now the star of an online game called Slayers in Gamer. Set in the near future, in a world where online gaming and real life have become blurred, and humans control other humans in mass-scale multiplayer games, he plays Kable, something of a 21st-century gladiator who is forced to fight against his will.
Every inch the buff action hero, he seems perfectly cast – but there’s also an unmistakable Scottishness to his appearance. The jaw may be chiselled, but I get the impression that one pie might send him into the realms of multiple chindom. He’s used to training hard for roles (see his impossible abs in 300) and following painfully strict diets, but the Scotsman in him finds the LA diet of mineral water with everything and no carbs after 6pm a little hard to stick to, and soon we’re discussing the merits of various deep-fried foodstuffs.
“I used to live on Leith Walk, and I mean in the dirty part,” he says. “I lived right above a fish and chip shop and I used to live on those fish and chips. The king rib supper …” Has he sampled the delights of the deep-fried Mars Bar? His eyes light up: “I’ve never had one! It’s like a phantom to me; I hear about it but I’ve never seen it on a menu in a fish and chip shop. I (diet] when I have to, but I have big problems, depending on my motivation. That’s the part of Scotland that haunts me; wanting to eat as many carbohydrates and as much sugar as possible.”
He’s undeniably Glaswegian in his penchant for deep-fried foodstuffs, and indeed in his ability to mock himself and to charm me; it’s a combination that has me stammering incoherently at some points.
He’s been doing interviews all day, he tells me, and despite his best efforts is a little weary of them. How can I make it more interesting for him? I enquire. He takes a gulp of water and peers cheekily at me over the rim of the glass: “You could start by doing it naked. That would definitely make it a lot easier. Can you do that?” Cue said incoherent stammering.
It’s a request which he doesn’t drop. Later, when the PR pokes her head through the door to tell us we’re nearly done, he says with a glint in his eye: “And you’ve still got to get naked now as well.” Ah, I lament jokingly, we’ve only got four minutes of the interview left. “That’s all it takes for me …” he says with a laugh (or, to be more specific, a surprisingly high-pitched giggle – endearing, yet somewhat jarring with the beefcake image).
He seems to have an innate ability to be explicitly flirtatious, yet remain utterly charming, without crossing over into slimeball territory. Let’s call it the Clooney effect. It’s a tactic that I imagine he employs with most women he meets. Including, if celebrity magazines are to be believed (and Butler, who has denied the rumours repeatedly, is not) Jennifer Aniston, his co-star in The Bounty Hunter, whom he keeps being asked if he’s dating.
He won’t be drawn on the topic, rather sensibly preferring not to discuss his romantic relationships, but does find it amusing that speculation is often so wide of the mark.
“I’ve managed to have … three relationships that nobody ever really found out about, and at the same time it’s been said … that I’ve been having relationships with various other people. But I was good at keeping them private because it becomes a different kind of relationship the second it becomes public and everybody starts prying.”
When it comes to other areas of his personal life however, he’s more than happy to spill. His time spent training to be a lawyer in Edinburgh was not a happy period in his life, resulting in some rather wild behaviour, which he is quite open about.
“When I think back now,” he says with a laugh. “You know those horrific memories that make a noise come out of your mouth involuntarily when you recall them? (cue a guttural sound in the back of his throat] That’s what happens when I think of some of the stuff I did there.” He later says the one other memory that provokes such a response is the time he said soccer instead of football on a UK radio station, but it’s his experiences at Morton Fraser that really make him cringe.
He is reluctant to recount his more shameful behaviour, fearing it would make a mockery of the ex-colleagues who put up with so much from him. He was on his final warning from the firm when the Edinburgh Festival came around again, and he knew that he’d be unable to resist the myriad temptations it offered. The result? That final warning turned into a dismissal.
“You know, they did me the biggest favour, and there was never any malice … They were like, ‘let’s face facts: you really think that in this state (it would be responsible of us to qualify] you as a lawyer?’”
So what exactly does a person have to do to get fired from an Edinburgh law firm a week before they’re due to qualify? “Oh, I would go to jail (if I told you] …” he laughs, glancing at my Dictaphone. “But, like, I would get so tired because I’d been out late the night before that I’d often find cupboards to go to sleep in, because if I didn’t I’d often fall asleep at my desk … in the same room as the partner of the firm.”
He shakes his head with disbelief before continuing. “And you know, calling in sick (then] going out to bars and thinking ‘oh they won’t see me’. Over two years I had 32 sick days and I think there was a total of about 20 Mondays. I mean, I laugh now but those days were incredibly miserable for me because I was trapped. Not even trapped in a law firm … but I was trapped in my life, I was trapped in my head, I didn’t know how to make myself happy.”
After being fired, Butler moved to London to pursue an acting career, and was cast in the lead role of a production of Trainspotting, one that he had seen at the Fringe the previous year and that had “broke my heart because I thought ‘this will never be me’.” One year on from that low moment he was back at the Fringe, performing in the show he’d been watching, standing on the stage instead of sitting in the audience. It’s unsurprising then, that he is a firm believer in destiny.
His career began to take off from there, but it wasn’t until 300 that he began to enjoy truly global fame. So if wine, women, song and general bad behaviour were his downfall back when he was just a trainee lawyer living above a chip shop on Leith Walk, would he have been even more self-destructive had he enjoyed the trappings of fame in his early twenties instead of his mid-thirties?
“Oh my God, I wouldn’t be here today I think,” he says. He employs a metaphor to explain why – “Although up until I started acting I’d been wearing a really uncomfortable pair of shoes that didn’t fit and then I put on ones that fit better, but maybe I just didn’t know how to wear them at first. It didn’t feel right so perhaps if I’d started (acting] earlier maybe I would have sorted myself out earlier … (Now it’s] just women and song. And coffee and Coca-Cola. I’ve always been a bit of an addict, so even when I stopped drinking and smoking (he gave up alcohol completely a decade ago] there were times even last year … when I was drinking eight to ten cans of Coca-Cola a day.”
Would he say that his drinking during his time in Edinburgh bordered on alcoholism? He gives the Dictaphone another glance, laughing, and shoots me a look that suggests I’m pushing my luck, before choosing his words carefully: “There were a few people who knew me (then] who would find it hard to argue with that statement,” he says, stifling another high-pitched giggle. “I definitely am kind of compulsive and obsessive (but] it’s some of those things that mess you up that are also the things that you have to celebrate.”
Cele-brate. Once again, the tail end of the word trails up into a question. Traces of a Scots accent are fighting through, but, at the moment at least, the American twang is winning out. It’s something he finds amusing, but he insists he’s a true Scotsman underneath.
“America’s pretty much where I live … but it never feels like where my soul is,” he says. “When I come back to Scotland, I go ‘this is it’. It’s everything. Everything I am is Scottish … It’s what gave me every part of my personality … all the good sh*t and all the bad sh*t that goes with that.
“There’s a lot of negativity there, but out of that negativity comes an incredible amount of humour. There’s nobody that can be more negative and more blackly funny than the Scots. And here I am in America now doing big comedies. I would say if I’d been an Italian guy I would never have got these kinds of roles. They love us out there.” Really?
“Oh yeah,” he says enthusiastically, before laughing at the irony: “Although one of the things I used to hear a lot in Hollywood was, ‘Oh I really love your accent, that’s beautiful – now, can you change it?’” sm
Gamer goes on general release on 16 September.
Gerard Butler’s just a regular ‘Gamer’
Gerard Butler’s just a regular ‘Gamer’
New York Daily News
BY Ethan Sacks
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sunday, August 30th 2009, 4:00 AM
After hearing the war stories from the making of his latest action thriller, “Gamer,” it’s no wonder Gerard Butler made a tactical retreat to romantic comedies like this summer’s “The Ugly Truth” and “The Bounty,” currently filming in New York.
Filming the intense action sequences for “Gamer,” opening Friday — in which the 39-year-old Scottish actor plays a wrongfully convicted soldier forced to join a human video game — took a physical toll.
There were stuntmen firing all kinds of guns and pyrotechnics all around him during the big action sequences. Despite the frigid winter temperatures in Albuquerque, where the movie was filmed, he was constantly being sprayed with freezing-cold water to make it look like he was drenched in sweat.
“You’d be doing some takes where there would be 15 to 20 explosions [that] were all around you, and you’d have to know where you were going or you were going to get blown up,” says Butler from the safety of a couch in a mid-Manhattan hotel room.
“I’ve got to say, in this movie, there were many times I was hit by flying debris from explosions or from squibs that would bang against your face or your head,” he says. “You’d get little injuries, but you move on, it’s part of the adrenaline.”
Since his breakthrough role as the hulking King Leonidas in “300,” Butler has been sprinting down a bizarre career path — one where he is equally comfortable portraying a lover or a fighter. He says he needs to recharge his batteries, physically and emotionally, after doing an action movie with a romantic comedy or a drama.
“There’s been a lot of door-to-door 16-hour days,” said Butler, “but just by the nature of what we do, you laugh a lot. … It’s breezier. And I’m not spending all this extra time doing gun training. But by the same token, you miss the testosterone.”
It isn’t even out of his range to muscle his way into a musical, as he did for 2004’s “The Phantom of the Opera.”
“It all starts with the fact that Gerard Butler is a hell of a good actor and has a wonderful sense of humor,” said Richard Donner, Butler’s director on the 2003 action movie “Timeline,” via e-mail. “He’s ‘a man’s man’, the kind of a person you want to go have a couple of beers with.”
He won’t just take any old role. For “Gamer,” he signed on only when filmmakers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the brains behind the “Crank” movies, convinced him of the film’s deeper allegory about society’s increasing overdependence on technology — sandwiched between explosions and haymakers, of course.
Butler still considers himself a regular guy — or at least as normal as he can be when he looks out the window of his Manhattan apartment and sees a giant poster of himself from “Gamer” across the street.
But life is getting surreal for him. Just hours after his interview with The News, Butler set gossip sites across the planet wagging with reports that he was spotted at a Meatpacking District club holding the hand of his co-star in “The Bounty,” Jennifer Aniston.
Dealing with paparazzi, he says, is one of the toughest things to get used to. They materialize suddenly, one recently catching Butler sitting outdoors at a restaurant and telling the actor that he wanted to snap him in the act of eating.
‘It was almost like holding out a [stick] for a dog,” says Butler, laughing at the memory. “Every time I got my fork, he picked his camera up, so I put it down again and he put his camera down. Then I’d pick it up again. “ This went on for 15 minutes.
“The only time I could eat was when a bus went past or a truck. Then literally the truck would stop and I go boom, boom, boom and I’d shovel the food in,” he said demonstrating frenetically with an imaginary utensil.
As much as he loves New York — and Los Angeles, where he splits his time — his occasional return trips to visit his family in Glasgow keep Butler grounded. He says he comes from a passionate people that was fighting among itself long before the English arrived. That “fire” fuels his performances.
And no one is willing to mix it up with the 6-foot-2 actor like his mother, Margaret. “I go home and they’ll cook Christmas dinner, and she’s like, ‘C’mon, give a hand, come on, wash the dishes or put the dishes away.’ “And I’m like, ‘Mom, I am a major Hollywood movie star, I can’t be doing this. It’s embarrassing.’ ”
But when his mother isn’t impressed, “I end up on my hands and knees, wiping up the floor.”
