Gerard Butler will be spending the next few months on the publicity rounds for his films Gamer (which comes out in a few weeks) and Law-Abiding Citizen (which comes out in October). Butler sat down with USA Today for an early interview to promote Gamer, and it’s a really charming piece. It’s long too – so try this if you’d like to read the whole article, I’m just going to put up what I find most interesting. Gerry met the USA Today reporter by riding on his Cannondale hybrid bike, rather than hiring a limo or SUV. Gerry talks about filming on The Bounty with Jennifer Aniston, and I’m sure that’s what most people will find interesting:

“I married Jennifer Aniston yesterday.”

Gerard Butler casually drops this bit of paparazzi bait during a conversation last week, between more mundane talk of his upcoming projects.

He wore a tux, she wore a white gown. “She looked beautiful,” Butler says.

Of course, if one of the country’s most famous and famously single women had really gotten hitched to the emerging A-lister, Butler, 39, would not be sitting alone in the clubby drawing room of The Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca with nary a camera lens in sight.

Indeed, the altar accoutrements were only for a brief moment in The Bounty, the buzzed-about Midnight Run-meets-War of the Roses caper due next summer in which Butler plays a bounty hunter whose next target is his ex-wife, Aniston. (The pair got gussied up to shoot a photograph of their characters’ once-upon-a-time nuptials.)

Still, “it was quite romantic,” Butler says. “We were joking about it: ‘We might as well make this real. Keep everybody happy,’ ” including the entertainment magazines, which have been speculating all summer that there’s more to their relationship than innocent, “we’re-just-totally-good-friends” hand-holding, as Butler characterizes it.

So, three minutes before the shoot, Butler tried to get Aniston’s hairstylist registered on the Internet as an officiant. He slipped a ring on her finger. (“She’s like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ “) And then, as the camera snapped, his cellphone rang. It was his mother.

“I have to call you back. I’m getting married,” Butler deadpanned on speakerphone for all the crew to hear. “She goes, ‘What?’ ” Butler clarified: ” ‘I’m marrying Jennifer Aniston!’ and she’s like: ‘Oh, good. Well, I’m glad you made the right choice.’ “

[From USA Today]

The rest of the piece is about Gamer and how everyone thinks Gerry is a great guy. Gerry mentions his workouts, saying that he “gets big quick” which I sincerely hope he means in other ways too. But he’s still not dishing on his personal life:

“I don’t know if I’m the best actor out there, but I definitely have, how would you say? I have a lot of range,” says the Scot, who can bury the brogue on command and manage a convincing American accent thanks to “easily 1,000” sessions with about 30 dialect coaches.

That variety is key to his industry appeal, Hollywood insiders say. “He’s definitely keeping his foot in the fact that he can be the action guy in some of the choices he’s making, but he’s also incredibly funny, charming and a ladies’ man,” says RocknRolla producer Susan Downey, who’s producing another Ritchie flick, the upcoming Sherlock Holmes starring her husband, Robert Downey Jr.

For Gamer, Butler has swapped Leonidas’ swords for submachine guns and his Mr. America abs for Popeye-like arms to play Kable, a death-row prisoner who’s competing in the shoot-’em-up game Slayers for a chance at freedom. The man at the joystick controlling him, and his destiny, is a 17-year-old kid. To get Kable-ready, Butler trained five hours a day, Uzi lessons plus two hours in the gym, for about six weeks before shooting started. His forearms in particular were “like, twice this size,” he says, extending his far-from-scrawny flesh-and-blood guns.

Pumping up requires good genes — “I get big quick” — hard work and mechanical intervention. “There’s a device that you hold and it wraps around your arm and you grip it and you go, ‘Grr!’ ” Is the grunting required? “You don’t have to, but I like to,” Butler says, laughing.

Gamer, for instance, is “a comment on science, technology, medicine and entertainment. … How far away are we from people actually saying, ‘We can create that. We can create a mini-war every day on our TVs and use people that are useless to us.’ ”

His guy’s-guy antics, on and off set, help make him accessible to male moviegoers and swoon-worthy to the legions of ladies who love him. By his count, there are 76 sites devoted to him, including GerardButlerGals.com. There are Gerard Butler conventions from Las Vegas to Glasgow, “which is insane,” he says. He has a 10-foot-by-10-foot-by-10-foot storage space in London packed with mail and presents (favorite fan tokens are, curiously enough, religious gifts such as crucifixes and rosaries). He owns enough chopsticks, gifted by Japanese admirers, to build a ship. Butler handles the attention with “such grace and such warmth,” Downey says.

“It’s very, very flattering, and I never will look on it too lightly because it’s great to be appreciated,” Butler says. He’s a movie star with Everyman issues — he spent his childhood largely without his father, his twentysomething carousing led him to quit drinking and smoking, the latter with much difficulty — which he says helps make him relatable. “I am very down-to-earth, and I’ve always been very open about my life and my struggles and my pains and my hopes and my fears.”

And he playfully addresses the kind of love-life questions most stars would swat down. Even though he swears he’s single, he says he has been in relationships. “I’m just very good at keeping them quiet.” His success, however, is making intimacy trickier.

“I was never one who was great at it in the first place, so I do look to the future with a certain amount of trepidation,” Butler says, laughing. “But it’s just going to take a good woman to come and put me in line, you know? Shake me about and go, ‘Come on!’ you know? To let me breathe but at the same time slap me about a bit” — and to always be ready for the joke.

[From USA Today]

The personal side of Gerard Butler is something I would love to know more about, even if I might not be able to handle it. Michael K at Dlisted put up a strange blind item from Bling Gossip yesterday, and he thinks it’s Gerry. Even though it’s strange to say this about my fantasy crush, I think it might be him too.

Here goes: “This under-40 primarily film actor is unmarried, so he certainly can date whoever he wants. However, the kind of girl he prefers dates for a living. He likes the fact that he can have them do whatever he wants with no strings attached and no fear of tabloid tattletales. However, one little detail has slipped out. While some men want the “girlfriend experience”, our guy wants the “fan experience”. His idea of warming up includes having the girl/s (sometimes more than one) clap and scream out his name like an admiring fan, and then chase him around the house begging for his autograph. We thought he was getting plenty of that in real life. Obviously his ego is a bottomless pit.” It certainly sounds like Gerry, doesn’t it?

Here’s Gerry on the set of “The Bounty” in Queens on Monday. Man he must be getting sick of that shirt. Images thanks to Fame Pictures .