When Gerard Butler throws himself into an action thriller, things get rough. Straightforward thrillers with dirty riots: This is the trademark of Butler, the often does his own stuntsover the past few years. No wonder he can tell some painful stories from his filming experiences.
Hardly any action film goes off the ground without some kind of scratch being picked up on set while all the parts of the film production are in motion. Butler, however, had sustained a performance injury long before his first action role – namely, during a Shakespeare adaptation on stage.
“I thought I had lost my eye”: Gerard Butler’s first role was a painful experience
No fistfights, no pyrotechnics: When Butler was a guest on Live! with Kelly and Mark a few years ago, he said that he sustained his first injury as an actor directly on his very first day in the profession sustained while on stage in a production of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus:
It was my first day as a professional actor. I was at the theater in a Shakespeare play called Coriolanus. I had the director [Steven Berkoff] persuaded to audition for the role. […] We rehearsed a scene with rebellious citizens.
Concorde
Gerard Butler in Criminal Squad
On the stage stood twelve actors with stakes in their hands, who were supposed to run from one end to the other, recite their lines and run back again. The focus was on the physical performanceas Butler explains … and that went wrong:
But we all had these stakes in our hands. I turned around and the guy next to me rams his wooden stake right into my eye. I thought I had lost my eye. I had a black eye for two weeks. And I knew that the director was just thinking: ‘That’s what I get for hiring an amateur.’ Not just Shakespeare: Gerard Butler was also seen at the theatre in a production of Trainspotting
Eventually, Butler’s eye healed and he came without permanent damage from his first acting experience. After Coriolanus, he played Mark Renton in the stage version of Danny Boyle’s cult film Trainspotting in Edinburgh. However, he did not stay in the theater for too long. In the 1990s, he began to focus more and more on his work in front of the camera.