Movie sets can be dangerous places and accidents happen. Some, like Harrison Ford breaking his ankle on the Millenium Falcon set while filming &Star Wars: The Force Awakens&, are major accidents that can actually cause filming delays. Others are less serious. And sometimes you get both ends of the spectrum in one day of filming. Ask Gerard Butler, who managed to injure three different people in separate accidents in one day during filming of his new movie Copshop.
Gerard Butler described the first of the three accidents, “I was fighting one stunt guy and he smacked his head on the lockers and his head split open, just because of where it was. He’s a friend of mine, by the way, and I’ve worked with him before, and he was totally cool about it but it was just so much blood coming out.”
Later in the day, Butler was working with a second stunt man in a similar fight scene. The stunt man dodged an attack from Butler and ended up knocking his head into a pillar. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Butler later that same day, managed to unintentionally shoot his co-star Ryan O’Nan in the stomach with a stun gun. “Ryan, for another role, has quite a big belly. He had to put on quite a lot of weight for that,” Butler said. “So the pad – because these things have spikes in them – came up and his belly was sticking out and I shot him.”
It was at this point that Butler joked that, after all of these injures, he was “thinking about retiring.” All three cast members have reportedly made full recoveries from their injuries, which must come as a great relief to Butler. Although accidents happen on set, no one wants to be the cause of such injuries.
&CopShop& is being produced by Open Road Films. They provided the following plot description to IMDb: Screaming through the Nevada desert in a bullet-ridden Crown Vic, wily con artist Teddy Murretto hatches a desperate plan to hide out from lethal hitman Bob Viddick: He sucker-punches rookie officer Valerie Young to get himself arrested and locked up in a small-town police station.
But jail can’t protect Murretto for long. Viddick schemes his own way into detention, biding his time in a nearby cell until he can complete his mission. When the arrival of a competing assassin ignites all-out mayhem, mounting threats force Viddick to get creative if he wants to finish the job and escape the explosive situation.
Gerard Butler, who admittedly doesn’t watch Ryan Reynolds movies is perhaps best known as King Leonidas in the movie 300& which many consider to be his breakthrough role. He has managed to keep very busy since that breakthrough role. &CopShop& stars Butler as hitman Bob Viddick, Frank Grillo as con artist Teddy Murretto, and Alexis Louder as rookie cop Valerie Young. Copshop will be released in the United States by Open Road Films on September 17, 2021. The international distribution rights are being handled by STX International, which will also release the film in the United Kingdom and Ireland.