He’s like a hairier Jason Statham. A producer has a slightly more shit film than The Stath would go for? Lightbulb - guess who’d do it and for less ££, your man shouty beard.
I hear this but surely - if we saw it acted out, or better still, drawn in panels like a cartoon - the process would be more like "The Stath won't do it" then we see the lightbulb... and then in the next panel it's "x won't do it either" followed by a panel with a slightly dimmer lightbulb etc The whole thing would be repeated several times until the panel in which the lighbulb is a puny candle and the man who (possibly) likes to be known as "The Butmeister" answers it and takes the role.
I don't know how many times the thing is repeated but I cannot believe he is as far up the hierarchy as to be "the poor man's Stath" - at best I'll allow him to be the "poor man's poor man's Stath".
My relationship with GB began when I saw that football film, there were flashbacks to him scoring the winner in the Champion's League final and I watched it idly wondering who the fuck the guy was and how we were ever supposed to believe that he could get with Catherine Zeta-Jones, then I googled and I was completely none-the-wiser. After about about fifteen minutes I was bored out of my skull and turned it off. Then some time later I was watching a film with a fat Scottish gangster inexplicably knobbing Milla Jovovich, and I googled to see who it was... the name Gerard Butler rang a distant bell but it was getting too late to watch that film (about 8pm) so I turned it off and started at the wall for a few hours instead. Then the other day Guy Ritchie's Rock-n-Rolla was on and amongst the cheeky cockernee gangsters was one with a Scottish accent who to my incredulous disbelief was being pursued sexually by Tom Hardy and Thandie Newton! I thought I'd seen this guy somewhere before maybe a few years back and I googled him and discovered that I'd seen him in two other films that day. I thought "this is weird" and then instantly totally forgot he existed until this thread revived my "interest" in him. So it seems that the guy has had a long career which, apart from the three films mentioned, seems to have run entirely parallel to everything I've ever seen.