"It Was A Nightmare & I Was A Whiny Little B-tch": Gerard Butler Explains Why Filming His New Movie Was So Difficult

Gerard Butler is no stranger to action movies. Though his first movie was a period piece, playing Archie Brown in Mrs. Brown, Butler’s career has oft included high-octane genre movies. After acting in Mrs. Brown, he went on to play a supporting role in the Pierce Brosnan Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, making his first foray into the action genre. He then revisited genre filmmaking the next year with his adventure fantasy movie Tale of the Mummy, which was released in 1998.

Fast-forward over 20 years, and Butler is still regularly involved in action movies. This can range from disaster movies like Geostorm and Greeland to action thrillers like Kandahar and Last Seen Alive. Though he has been in a lot of one-off movies, Butler has also made his way into franchise content. This includes the DreamWorks animated franchise How to Train Your Dragon and the Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen series. There is also a sequel in development for Greenland, his 2020 disaster movie. Butler’s most recent sequel had some tough action movie challenges.

Butler Had Challenges Filming Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera

The Actor Faced A Tough Injury

Butler explains why Den of Thieves 2: Pantera was so difficult for him to film. A follow-up to the 2018 film Den of Thieves, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera continues the story of Big Nick, who is trying to stop a series of diamond thieves in Europe. Den of Thieves 2: Pantera features Butler in the lead role with a supporting cast that includes O’Shea Jackson Jr., Evin Ahmad, Salvatore Esposito, Orli Shuka, and Nazmiye Oral. It is releasing in theaters today, January 10, making it one of the first big releases of 2025.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Butler reveals how an injury made his time working on Den of Thieves 2: Pantera more difficult. The actor explained that he had just had surgery before filming, and then tore his ACL before starting filming. As a result, he “made this movie with a freshly torn ACL.” Co-star Jackson Jr. chimes in that there were “so many stairs in that movie,” which created an additional challenge to the already-physical scenes. Check out the full quotes from Butler and Jackson Jr. below:

Butler: This was a weird time for me at the beginning of this movie because I’d been through a pretty intense surgery, and then I tore my ACL fully about a month later and then started this movie. So I was not in the best shape, and it was a pretty physical movie, and I didn’t have a chance to get the surgery on my ACL, so I made this movie with a freshly torn ACL, and it was pretty rough. But yeahโ€ฆ I wanted to put a ‘but’ in to make it sound positive, but it wasn’t positive; it was a nightmare! And I was a whiny little bitch!

Jackson Jr.: Oh my God, there were so many stairs in that movie too!

Butler: There were so many stairs. I’m like, ‘Really, we have to set this whole movie on a hill?’ So it was intense, but it definitely made the action scenesโ€ฆ I had to do less acting.

Our Take On Gerard Butler’s Set Experience

His Surgery Was Likely One Of The Production Delays

Butler’s statement confirms that director Christian Gudegast’s recent comments about a main actor with a knee injury were in reference to Butler. It sounds like the main actor’s major surgery may have further delayed production on Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, which was already delayed due to the COVID pandemic. Dealing with a demanding action set is no new task for Butler, but grappling with that task on a torn ACL may have been unwelcome new territory for him.

Source: EW