Gerard Butler recalls filming Zack Synder's 300: "Every day somebody was getting taken to the hospital"

Gerard Butler has recalled filming Zack Snyder's historical epic 300 – and, while art doesn't quite imitate life, it does sound pretty brutal.

"I remember every day somebody was getting taken to the hospital," Butler said in a recent interview with People. "You’d be doing a fight, you turn around, there’s a guy down there, a spear went in his eye. Another time, you turn around, there’s a guy over there who just fell, broke his ankle. I mean, it was insane."

Released in 2006, the movie tells a fictionalized version of the Battle of Thermopylae in the Greco-Persian Wars back in 480 BC. Butler plays Leonidas, the King of Sparta, who leads 300 Spartans into battle against the much, much larger Persian army. The cast of the historical epic also includes Dominic West, Lena Headey, and Michael Fassbender.

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A sequel, 300: Rise of an Empire, followed in 2014, and a TV show is currently in the works. "We're just getting ready to dive in and get to work on it. It's super fun, I love the world," Snyder told ComicBook last year. "And even just in the preliminary meetings we've had talking about, like, 'What if this happened or that happened,' just a lot of it's just really fun to like go, wow, it's a rich standard.

As for Butler, he can currently be seen in Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, a sequel to the 2018 heist movie Den of Thieves. He stars as an LA sheriff who follows a career criminal, played by O'Shea Jackson Jr., to Europe and finds himself caught up in the world of diamond thieves.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is out now in theaters. For more, fill out your watchlist with our guide to all the biggest movie release dates in 2025.