Extra! Extra! More from Our April 2008 (Man)ifesto Interview with Gerard Butler

By Holly Hays
When we caught up with Gerard Butler, he had just wrapped up filming a movie in New Mexico and was on his way to the airport. Gerard didn’t have a lot of time to talk, but turns out you don’t need a lot of time to be completely won over by the outgoing, funny star. Here’s a little more from our interview with him.
What was it like playing a dad?
[Laughs] Yeah, it was interesting. You know, it’s funny. You always kind of dread that moment when you go from being the young, hip guy and they say, “We want you to be a dad.” And you go, “Oh, f---. Okay, I’m a dad now.” [Laughs] But you know, I always felt that I was really right for that role. When you feel right for something and you know it’s gonna be something different and a challenge, then that’s exciting to me. So to take on that idea of playing a dad who’s not just a dad, he’s kind of a very sweet but geeky scientist. He and his daughter live a very unusual existence on this island and he’s a father to her, but they’re best friends as well. They’re really on the same level in a lot of ways.
Do you think of yourself as having an adventurous spirit?
Oh, yeah! I mean, I think that’s a similarity between both characters [I play in Nim’s Island]. I mean, obviously, Alex Rover is an adventurer by trade. But in a way so is Jack [Nim’s dad]. I mean, he and Nim have sailed around the world and found this little paradise of a secluded island and nobody even knows where they are. And he goes off out to sea to search for the strangest sort of marine creatures that you can imagine. So, yeah, I have an adventurous spirit. I can definitely buy into what these characters do, which is why I’ve often taken on these kinds of roles.
What would you say is your ideal date: ziplining through the jungle or an oceanside dinner? Or something even better?
I think doing anything conventional — like, yeah, an oceanside dinner — would be awesome. But I like the idea that you do something that automatically pulls a little bit more out of both of you. Like for me, actually, a great date is to meet somebody and walk through the streets of a city and grab a coffee. Two people get to know each other so well just by reacting to each other and their environment. Whether it’s a park bench or a statue or the smell in the evening air or the characters that they run into — to me that is so much more fun than just sitting down at a table and doing what everybody else does. So ziplining would be my choice.
Fill in the blank: My secret superpower would be...
Probably being able to travel through space, travel right to the other side of the universe or into other universes, to other dimensions. So we’re not talking about disappearing and turning up in Paris or something. We’re talking about turning up on Mars.I mean even further than that. There’s that photograph by Carl Sagan that shows that the Earth is a tiny speck of light in a ray shining from some distant star, and we realize how tiny we are. I want to be over there. To think that you could experience that — even for a tenth of a second — would be awesome. All the wars, all the violence, all the people fighting for a piece of this planet, and in the end, it’s really just this tiny speck. I think that if everybody could venture out into space and realize how small the planet is, even for just a few seconds, I bet you there would be peace all over the world.