Gerard Butler is about to play a lighthouse keeper in his latest film – we profile his life and career
Once a troubled wildman who found solace at the bottom of a bottle, Gerard Butler’s latest role in a moving film about the Flannan Isles mystery reveals an actor who has come of age,
Over the years Gerard Butler has racked up action man pictures, romantic comedies, lovelorn dramas, the odd children’s movie, and even an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, but his new film The Vanishing, which premiered at last month’s Glasgow Film Festival, shows a side of Butler that most of us have never seen before: a fine, fearful dramatic performance that has even won admiration from Butler’s greatest foe – the critics.
The Vanishing shines a light on the puzzle of the three Flannan Isles lighthouse keepers, one of Scotland’s great unsolved mysteries dating back to Boxing Day 1900, when relief keeper Joseph Moore arrived and found the lighthouse deserted, with unmade beds, missing oilskins, a single upturned chair and no clue as to what had become of the three men.
The picturesque loneliness of a lighthouse is an ideal setting for a psychodrama; already the disappearance of the keepers has spawned a Peter Maxwell Davies opera, a Genesis song, a Doctor Who episode, and radio plays. Butler’s new film uses Mull of Galloway to stand in for the Flannans, where good-
natured James (Butler), veteran keeper Thomas (Peter Mullan) and a nervy trainee (Connor Swindalls) arrive at the beacon for a six-week shift on a barren rock. The discovery of a deadly mercury leak is only the first sign of the many troubles to come.
Shedding the swagger of his Hollywood action films, Butler plays a family man who is broken by guilt and greed. It’s a performance so good that the Los Angeles Times reviewer was moved to wonder why Paisley’s finest hasn’t featured in dramatic roles more often.
Film fans who have a soft spot for Butler have had their commitment to his work tested over the years. He remains best known for playing the greased-up, cartoonishly-chiselled King of Sparta in 300, but other choices haven’t always been so spectacular. Butler himself admitted in 2013 that he needed to change his diet of macho action and rough-wooing romcoms.
‘If you make a few movies in Hollywood that don’t make a lot of money, you’ve got to be careful,’ he explained at the time. ‘I feel like I’ve come out of a string of – I’ve got to be careful what I say, but – a string of bad-luck movies. Sometimes my fault, but other times not my fault.’
Biographers might argue that the actor’s own life would make an intriguing film, with themes of double abandonment, self-destruction, addiction, determination and redemption.
Gerard describes his father as ‘a bit of a crazy man’. A Paisley bookie, he owned five betting shops at one stage, until one too many risky bets bankrupted the family and Edward Butler fled to Canada, leaving behind his pregnant wife.
Six months after her baby was born, Margaret flew out to reunite her husband with new son Gerard James and their two older children, Brian and Lynn, but within two years she was back in Paisley with no money and no husband. The marriage collapsed in Canada, leaving Margaret to raise her three small children as a single parent. After work, she took night classes and became a lecturer in business studies. ‘I had the best mother on the planet,’ says her proud son, although he also admits that growing up without seeing his father left him with ‘certain issues’.
Edward Butler was absent from his children’s lives for 14 years, until a 16-year-old Gerard came home from St Margaret’s High School one day, and was told his father was waiting for him in a nearby restaurant. Only when he spotted his sister was he able to work out which man was his dad.
Gerard and Edward became closer in time, but the reconciliation was shortlived. When Butler was 22, and studying law at Glasgow University, his father was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer and passed away soon after.
After losing his father for a second time, his youngest son went off the rails. At school he had been head boy, at university he was president of the student’s law society, but after he became a trainee civil lawyer, he went into a tailspin of hard-core partying. He skipped work and drank heavily.
‘I had gone from a 16-year-old who couldn’t wait to grasp life to a 22-yearold who didn’t care if he died in his sleep,’ he said. During boozing sessions he smashed bottles over his head, once climbed a cruise ship in order to hang from the outside railing while singing Rod Stewart’s We Are Sailing, and in one alarming episode he woke up in Paris covered in blood with no idea what had happened the night before.
The drinking and absenteeism did not go unnoticed at work, and a week
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His life would be an intriguing film, abandonment, selfdestruction, addiction and redemption
before he was due to qualify as a solicitor, he was fired by his legal firm. Now jobless, he decided to try his luck in London and become an actor.
At first he did anything but act; instead, he waited on tables, worked in telemarketing and demonstrated toys at sales fairs. However, his fortunes changed when he began dating a casting director called Sue Jones. He started helping her out, and when she was working on auditions for a new production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, she brought him along to read out parts and feed lines to the actors.
The play’s director Steven Berkoff was so impressed by Butler’s energy and enthusiasm that he offered him a small part in the play itself. At 27 he had his first professional acting job.
Butler was a member of the Scottish Youth Theatre as a teenager, but has no other formal drama training, nor any regrets. ‘Sean Connery always said he’d learnt more through life experience than any school of acting could have taught him, and I certainly feel that’s true in my case,’ he said.
It certainly didn’t stop him playing the character of Renton in a stage adaptation of Trainspotting, before scoring his big-screen debut in Mrs Brown as Billy Connolly’s little brother, followed by a role in the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies. He also landed TV work, including The Young Person’s Guide to Becoming a Rock Star, where he played Marty Claymore, an enjoyable parody of Wet Wet Wet’s Marti Pellow, and within two years got his first lead in a Scottish film called One More Kiss – a film whose budget was so tight that when they filmed a scene in a chef’s kitchen in the morning, the meal Butler cooked in front of the camera was then served up to the cast and crew for lunch.
Aged 30 and hungry for success, he flew off to try his luck in Hollywood. ‘When I started out, I’m not sure I was actually in it for the right reasons,’ Butler reflected later. ‘I wanted very much to be famous. I did expect to succeed and I did have faith that I would. In reality, though, it has turned out to be something very different to what I wanted. It’s the work and not the adulation that has proved to be the most fulfilling.’
Within a year, he had been cast in the title role for Attila The Hun, a big budget mini-series that relished the brutal and lusty sides of Mr Hun. However, an attempt to position him as a vampire for millennials in Dracula 2000 lacked bite, and despite fighting off competition from John Travolta and Nicolas Cage to sing the part of the masked, cloaked musical genius in a screen version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, the film
also skirted perilously close to the thrill of watching Batman meet Liberace. Still, at least Angelina Jolie drew most of the critical flak when they worked together in the lacklustre Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.
Butler is humble enough to admit that ‘I’ve made enough movie mistakes in my career – just look at my CV’. However, during this period he also made two surprise hits; a subtle turn as a stranger paid to pretend to be a deaf boy’s dad in the Scottish picture Dear Frankie, and of course 300, an ecstasy of steel, flesh, muscle and rage that ensured Butler’s raucous battle cry of ‘This Is Sparta’ became a YouTube favourite.
Butler gave up drinking after his move to London, and by Los Angeles his addictive personality was focussed on work, whether spending long hours in the gym to become a strapping muscle-bound warrior for 300 or long sessions training with a singing teacher for Phantom of the Opera.
The balance to his ferocious drive is a schoolboyish sense of humour; on the set of his sci-fi picture Gamer, he sent his co-directors a box of half a dozen doughnuts each. The next day Gerard and the lads got another half-dozen doughnuts, stuck them in their backsides and sent pictures of them to the producers – who thought they were the doughnuts they had eaten. ‘They freaked out,’ says a cheerful Butler.
Later he told Shortlist magazine: ‘It was my birthday that day and about ten of the cast dropped their trousers to reveal “Happy Birthday Gerry” written across their cheeks. Come to think of it, there was a little too much ass in the making of this film.’
Joking around on set may be popular with the crew but joking with the press has sometimes landed him in hot water. After Pierce Brosnan retired from the James Bond franchise, a favourite press question for Butler was whether he was being lined up as the next James Bond. Eventually he teased a reporter by claiming that he was indeed talking to 007 producer Barbara Broccoli, and was prepared to pick up the Walther PPK, provided the doughty MP Ann Widdecombe would agree to be his Bond girl. ‘The next day in the Scottish papers, they had taken one half of it and said: “Gerald Butler is going to be the next James Bond”. That’s when you think, “Should I just lose my sense of humour completely?”’
Butler’s laddish, self-deprecating antics, on and off set, may help make him accessible to male moviegoers while female fans have created Twitter feeds and fan-sites like ‘Gerard Butler: the Hot Scot’, dedicated to blogging and gossiping about what the Butler did.
His exploits include real life heroics: while filming Mrs Brown, he saved a boy from drowning in the Tay and received a Certificate of Bravery from the Royal Humane Society. In 2015, he reconnected with the man he rescued, recording
a surprise speech for Daniel Smith’s wedding day after receiving a request from Daniel’s best man. ‘I’m such a perfectionist that I did five speeches – funny ones, moving ones and they were quite dirty at points,’ he said later. ‘I said, “I feel like I’ve been there at all the most important moments of your life: I was there the day you almost drowned and now I’m here for your wedding...”’
Another inevitable by-product of celebrity is speculation about his own wedding plans: Butler has been romantically linked to Jennifer Aniston, Cameron Diaz and Naomi Campbell – affairs that he has denied. For now, he appears to be in a fouryear on-off relationship with interior designer Morgan Brown, with the switch currently in the ‘off ’ position. In interviews, bachelor Butler blames his father’s abandonment for his commitment issues with women.
The restlessness extends to property, with homes in Hollywood, New York and Glasgow, although his main base in Malibu was destroyed in last winter’s Southern California fires. Even his voice has no fixed abode. ‘I sound so American, it really freaks me out,’ he admitted in 2009. ‘During an interview the other day, I said soccer instead of football and it threw me into a complete spin.’ Now when he returns to Scotland to see family and friends, he ritually heads for the Starbucks at Glasgow airport to test his accent is still tuned to local frequencies by asking for a coffee in his best west of Scotland brogue.
Since his breakthrough casting as Archie Brown in 1997’s Mrs Brown, most of Butler’s roles have required an American accent – but one exception is his Scottish Viking warrior Stoick in the How To Train Your Dragon trilogy. Butler offered the filmmakers a range of options but they declared his natural voice the winner. The upshot was that all the dragon-training Vikings in the animated adventures have also become Scots, although the children in the movies, who have grown up far from their Viking home, have accents that are closer to Pasadena than Paisley.
How To Train Your Dragon 3 opened across the UK in January but it’s The Vanishing that suggests a new purpose to Butler’s career, and a desire to show audiences and studios that there’s real meat within the beefcake.
There are also signs that Butler is seeking stronger ties to his homeland, including the purchase of a £600,000 three-bedroom flat in Giffnock, outside Glasgow, in 2015, as a place to kick back with old pals. ‘I grew up loving being Scottish and have a real passion for home and family. The hardest thing about being an actor and living in LA – and I’m not complaining – is that there’s lots of moving around and not a lot of spare time to maintain the ties and closeness you have to family and close friends. ‘I love living in LA, and Dubai and Australia, too. They are amazing places to spend time in and, in the short term, are exactly what I’m after but, in the end, I want to move back to Scotland – back to my roots. Whenever I go home, I always return to LA feeling more like myself. Life in LA can be a bit soft. I like to come back with Scottish attitude.’
Above all he credits his mother for keeping the 6ft 2in actor grounded, by refusing to give him the star treatment on flying visits home. ‘She’s like, “C’mon, give a hand, come on, wash the dishes or put the dishes away”,’ according to Butler. ‘And I’m like, “Mum, I am a major Hollywood movie star, I can’t be doing this. It’s embarrassing”. But I end up on my hands and knees, wiping up the floor.’