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One night, when he was 15 years old, Gerard Butler dreamed about the movie Krull. The 1983 science-fiction saga, which he calls “a cheap version of Lord of the Rings,” earned poor reviews and flopped at the box office. But its ambitious, anachronistic fantasy—about a valiant prince leading his army against an evil creature—made a deep impression. Its castles and sweeping landscapes nestled inside his teenage subconscious, and Butler awoke consumed with a desire to be an actor—and to continue living in those worlds.
“I’ve always been guided by dreams,” Butler tells me. “I knew I wanted to tell those stories—to have some sense of renewed courage and excitement and curiosity, or a wish to be more of a warrior or hero.”
It’s a funny, bite-sized actor origin story, one that nurtured Butler as a Scottish adolescent and has remained a prominent influence throughout his long Hollywood career. That’s included high-decibel theatrics, like his breakout as King Leonidas in the 2004 epic 300, and droll performances in a handful of mediocre late-aughts romantic comedies that failed to establish him as a leading man. Over the last decade, however, his dream to feel like “more of a warrior or hero” has taken on near-literal significance. Along with peers like Liam Neeson and Mark Wahlberg, Butler has carved his own specific niche: where Wahlberg is an earthbound superhero, and Neeson a very angry dad, Butler is an everyman action hero, saving the world with a charming-if-forgettable on-screen persona. In the process, he’s become a bankable star, capable of anchoring, and occasionally elevating, numerous mid-budget disaster flicks.
Greenland is the latest variation on his macho theme—and though it offers a slight departure from Butler’s gun-blazing and ass-kicking, he remains the heroic center of a family caught in an apocalyptic hellscape. His foe here, unlike the requisite foreign and domestic terrorists he’s previously defeated, is an extinction-level comet plummeting to earth. This requires a different kind of counterattack, because “he’s not going to go up and punch this comet in the face,” Butler laughs on a Zoom call with the movie’s director, Ric Roman Waugh. In the midst of marital strife, his character, John Garrity, must transport his wife and son from their suburban Atlanta home to an undisclosed governmental bunker, avoiding fireballs, separations and mass hysteria. It requires physicality, sure, but the story leans more on Butler’s protective nature. “True masculinity is a man that is not afraid to show his vulnerabilities and to confront his demons,” Waugh says. “I’m going to try to convey complex issues and he’s going to play them in a very honest and sincere way.”
Those qualities—and most of Butler’s mid-late-career renaissance—trace back to his role as Secret Service agent Mike Banning, the chiseled ex-Army Ranger who began the Butler’s ascent (descent?) into bruised superheroism. In what would become an unlikely franchise, 2013’s Olympus Has Fallen cast Butler as a disgraced presidential detail member who climbs back into duty to save the Commander in Chief—and Washington, D.C.—from rogue North Korean terrorists planning to obtain the country’s nukes. He performed similar duties in the 2016 sequel London Has Fallen, another jingoistic fantasy. Much the same happens in the third entry, 2019’s Angel Has Fallen (directed by Waugh, starting their collaboration). In between those films, which earned a collective $523 million worldwide, Butler has traveled to space to prevent a weather-induced holocaust in 2017’s Geostorm (another $222 million globally), and plunged beneath the ocean to prevent World War III in 2018’s Hunter Killer. By now, it’s obvious. If the world is on the brink of annihilation, and the Avengers are busy, you could do worse than Butler.