Cinema Confidential have a short, but interesting, interview with Gerard Butler on playing the lead in The Phantom of the Opera on the very tough sounding preparation for the role. There’s even recognition that he was stepping into a role that was going to be hard to live up to:
I’d walk past the 600 crew, they’d be like √¢‚Ǩ‚Äù when do you start, when do you start? You√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re The Phantom Of The Phantom! When do you start? And you know, it kind of made me a little crazy, because obviously I was nervous about taking on this role, and also knedw there were a lot of people going √¢‚Ǩ‚Äù what has he got? Who is this guy? Why is he The Phantom? So therefore instills a lot of fear and fear is the great motivator
I worked really hard on this. In fact there were a couple of times when Joel said – back off, you’re working too hard, just relax. Especially with the voice. Because my voice was always developing and I was working so hard on everything that it was getting really exhausted before I even started filming, because I had just come off three movies – four movies kind of back to back.
Take a look, and watch out for the movie. As John has raved about before, there’s nothing better than taking a really great story and moving it, unadulterated, to the big screen. Phantom definitely has that strong, classical story. Let’s see how it translates. Post us when you see it, do you think Butler was the right choice, does he carry it off?
One last quote from the interview, before I copy everything. When asked about the rumours connecting him with Bond:
These rumors are very entertaining, that’s all I can say.
Who knows. With a couple of actors admitting that they are blatantly self promoting themselves for the role, and even making up rumours themselves, who can tell if there’s a chance or not. Fingers crossed though, personally I’d love it to go to a Scot!
