No, Gerard Butler hasn’t decided that acting in dodgy rom coms is such a gruelling experience that he wants to give up the acting lark and switch to life on a building site: he’s signed on to star in the adaptation of thriller novel The Bricklayer.
Written by former FBI agent Paul Lindsay – who publishes under the name Noah Boyd – The Bricklayer features a rogue former bureau-man-turned-construction type who is called him by his ex-colleagues to help stop a criminal group that is demanding increasingly high series of ransom payments. He works alongside a female deputy director of the FBI, and that part will no doubt be handed to some big-name actress. Hopefully not Katherine Heigl or Jennifer Aniston…
Millenium Films nabbed the rights to the book, which hit the shelves early last year. Enigma screenwriter Hanna Weg has been hired to pen the adaptation. There’s no word on a director or start date yet.
And Butler has been breaking free of fluffy film hell recently, with the likes of Coriolanus and Machine Gun Preacher both on the way.