The live-action adaptation of the animated film “How to Train Your Dragon” is coming next year with one key actor from the originals making the jump to live-aciton – Gerard Butler. The Scottish action star will reprise his role as Stoick the Vast, chief of the Hooligan Tribe and the father of Hiccup. To do so though, Butler had to endure some fairly brutal filming conditions.
The project was shot in Northern Ireland starting in the depths of winter, Butler telling : “It was very cold and kind of miserable because we went at the worst time. It was December, or really starting in January.” Four months of shooting took place in the locale, and Butler took things further by taking ice baths everyday at 5am: “I would get in this ice bath, but outside it would be dark with wind blowing, soaking wet.
You know how freezing it was. At least if you’re doing an ice bath and you’re in LA it’s a blue sky. This was like, ‘I am going out into that.
'” Then came in the challenge of his costume which came in at 90 pounds when fully geared up: “I had seven layers, thick layers, and a thick beard, and then I had a kind of bearskin or wolfskin over it. It was heavy as s—. When I had my sword and my shield and the helmet, which was heavy, and all those layers with the clasps that went around, it was 90 pounds, my costume.
I was, in the middle of the coldest day, soaking wet from sweat inside because it was like a furnace in there. So, I guess I had the benefit of— I was.