Gerard James Butler (born 13 November 1969) is a Scottish actor and film producer. After studying law, he turned to acting in the mid-1990s with small roles in productions such as Mrs Brown (1997), the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), and Tale of the Mummy (1998). In 2000, he starred as Count Dracula in the gothic horror film Dracula 2000. He played Attila the Hun in the miniseries Attila (2001), then appeared in the films Reign of Fire (2002) and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life (2003) before starring in the science fiction film Timeline (2003). He played Erik, The Phantom in Joel Schumacher's 2004 musical The Phantom of the Opera.

Butler gained wider recognition for his portrayal of King Leonidas in Zack Snyder's fantasy war film 300 (2006). In 2010, he began lending his voice to the How to Train Your Dragon franchise. Also in the 2010s, he portrayed a Secret Service agent in the action thriller Has Fallen film series, played military leader Tullus Aufidius in the 2011 film Coriolanus, and Sam Childers in the 2011 action biopic Machine Gun Preacher. Butler had further action film roles in Geostorm (2017), Den of Thieves (2018), Greenland (2020), and Plane (2023).

Gerard James Butler was born in Paisley, Scotland, on 13 November 1969, the youngest of three children of Margaret and Edward Butler, a bookmaker. His family, which is Catholic, is of Irish descent. His family moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, when he was six months old. A year later, when his parents' marriage broke down, his mother left Montreal and returned to Scotland with Butler.

Butler was head boy at St Mirin's & St Margaret's High School in Paisley and won a place at University of Glasgow School of Law. He also attended Scottish Youth Theatre while a teenager. He did not see his father again until he was 16, when Edward Butler called to meet him at a Glasgow restaurant. After the meeting, Butler cried for hours, and recalled later: "That emotion showed me how much pain can sit in this body of yours; pain and sorrow that you don't know you have until it is unleashed."

As a student, he was the president of the university law society, a position he later said he "kind of blagged my way into". When Butler was 22, his father was diagnosed with cancer and died. He said of this period in his life: "I had gone from a 16-year-old who couldn't wait to grasp life to a 22-year-old who didn't care if he died in his sleep."

Before his final year of law school, Butler took a year off to live in California—mostly in Venice Beach, where he held different jobs, travelled often, and, he says, drank heavily; at one point he was arrested for alcohol-related disorderly conduct. Describing his behaviour during that year, he recalled: "I was out of control, and justifying it with this idea that 'I'm young, this is life. This is me just being boisterous.' " After his time off in America, he returned to Scotland to finish his final year at law school.

He had ear surgery as a child that left him with a mangled ear. He still suffers from tinnitus and has hearing loss in his right ear.

Upon graduation, he took a position as a trainee lawyer at an Edinburgh law firm. However, he continued to stay out late drinking and frequently missed work. One week before he qualified as a lawyer, he was fired. At the age of 25, and an unqualified lawyer, he moved to London to pursue his dream of becoming famous. He admitted, "When I started out, I'm not sure I was actually in it for the right reasons. I wanted very much to be famous."