Here’s something you should know about me – when I fall for a celebrity, really, totally and completely adore a celebrity, it takes me a while to see any faults, any cracks in their perfect (in my mind) persona. I’m at that utter devotion state with Gerard Butler – he’s been atop my “Favorite Guy To Fantasize About When I’m Going To Sleep” list for the better part of a year and a half. No movie star has had this kind of run since the “Golden Fantasy Era” of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, John Malkovich and Eddie Vedder. Gerard is special.

Even when Gerard occasionally grosses me out (like when he’s rubbing Jennifer Aniston’s thigh or whatever), I’m still quite fond of him. Truthfully, I know that the Gerry that exists in my head is probably nothing like the real man. I’d still like to think the real Gerry has some of the qualities I have attributed to him – I’d like to think he’s sweet, funny, flirtatious and dirty. But it’s gotten to the point where real life has intruded on my fantasy. I have to shamefully acknowledge that there’s probably something really wrong with him. “Wrong” as in “skeezy”. “Wrong” as is “the guy is probably a major douchenozzle.”

Such is the story that LaineyGossip put up Monday afternoon. Lainey described two different stories about Gerard and how he behaves around women. One I buy, one I don’t. The first was a story about how he was coming on to a journalist who told him something like “I’m a journalist so I’m off limits.” Allegedly, Gerard responded “No, you’re not off limits.” Okay… I buy that, but it doesn’t really turn me off. He’s confident, he’s flirty, and I probably would have been all over that. The other story wasn’t so pleasant. It involved Gerry propositioning a drunk girl, trying to get her to take off her clothes and dance. Ew… gross.

Gerry is just starting a new promotional tour, this one for Gamer, the movie where he plays some kind of flesh-and-blood video game “character” who spends most of the movie running around killing things. Needless to say, it’s a boy movie. Gerry gave an interview to the New York Daily News to promote Gamer. It’s a sort of boring interview, but I like the part where Gerry takes about how his mom won’t let him get away with stuff:

Filming the intense action sequences for “Gamer,” opening Friday — in which Gerard Butler, the 39-year-old Scottish actor, plays a wrongfully convicted soldier forced to join a human video game — took a physical toll.

There were stuntmen firing all kinds of guns and pyrotechnics all around him during the big action sequences. Despite the frigid winter temperatures in Albuquerque, where the movie was filmed, he was constantly being sprayed with freezing-cold water to make it look like he was drenched in sweat.

“You’d be doing some takes where there would be 15 to 20 explosions [that] were all around you, and you’d have to know where you were going or you were going to get blown up,” says Butler from the safety of a couch in a mid-Manhattan hotel room. “I’ve got to say, in this movie, there were many times I was hit by flying debris from explosions or from squibs that would bang against your face or your head,” he says. “You’d get little injuries, but you move on, it’s part of the adrenaline.”

“It all starts with the fact that Gerard Butler is a hell of a good actor and has a wonderful sense of humor,” said Richard Donner, Butler’s director on the 2003 action movie “Timeline,” via e-mail. “He’s ‘a man’s man’, the kind of a person you want to go have a couple of beers with.”

He won’t just take any old role. For “Gamer,” he signed on only when filmmakers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the brains behind the “Crank” movies, convinced him of the film’s deeper allegory about society’s increasing overdependence on technology — sandwiched between explosions and haymakers, of course.

Dealing with paparazzi, he says, is one of the toughest things to get used to. They materialize suddenly, one recently catching ­Butler sitting outdoors at a restaurant and telling the actor that he wanted to snap him in the act of eating.

‘It was almost like holding out a [stick] for a dog,” says Butler, laughing at the memory. “Every time I got my fork, he picked his camera up, so I put it down again and he put his camera down. Then I’d pick it up again. ” This went on for 15 minutes.

“The only time I could eat was when a bus went past or a truck. Then literally the truck would stop and I go boom, boom, boom and I’d shovel the food in,” he said demonstrating frenetically with an imaginary utensil.

As much as he loves New York — and Los Angeles, where he splits his time — his ­occasional return trips to visit his family in Glasgow keep Butler grounded. He says he comes from a passionate people that was fighting among itself long before the English arrived. That “fire” fuels his performances.

And no one is willing to mix it up with the 6-foot-2 actor like his mother, Margaret. “I go home and they’ll cook Christmas ­dinner, and she’s like, ‘C’mon, give a hand, come on, wash the dishes or put the dishes away.’ “And I’m like, ‘Mom, I am a major Hollywood movie star, I can’t be doing this. It’s embarrassing.’ ”

But when his mother isn’t impressed, “I end up on my hands and knees, wiping up the floor.”

[From the New York Daily News]

What’s the verdict? Is Gerard just a mama’s boy who refuses to grow up? Is he a douche who treats women like crap? Is he the guy in the blind item who hires hookers for the “fan experience” to feed his bottomless ego? Or is he just bidding his time, waiting for me to find him so we can settle down and have hot half-Scottish babies? Sigh. He’s a douche, isn’t he?

Screw you guys. I’m still going to fantasize about him.

Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston are shown on the set of The Bounty on 8/24/09. Credit: Steve Sands/Bauergriffinonline.com