Gerard Butler claims that he doesn’t watch Ryan Reynolds’ films. The Scottish actor, best known for action blockbusters like 300, is currently promoting his new picture, Copshop, which came out earlier this month. Meanwhile, Reynolds is riding high on the success of Free Guy, which has gotten mostly good reviews and is now among the top ten highest-grossing films of the year.

Butler stars with Frank Grillo, Toby Huss, and Alexis Louder in Open Road Films’ Copshop, a new Robert Rodriguez-inspired action thriller in which he is joined by Frank Grillo, Toby Huss, and Alexis Louder to tell the story of a con artist on the run from a lethal assassin. During his publicity tour for their next picture, he was accompanied by Alexis Louder.

Butler’s career choices, particularly in the last decade, are reminiscent of 90s box office giants, whether it’s his Fallen trilogy or catastrophe films like Geostorm and Greenland. Reynolds, on the other hand, represents a new breed of blockbuster, with films like Deadpool and the recently released Free Guy – and it appears that they aren’t Butler’s cup of tea.

He told Unilad what initially prompted him to choose this role while promoting the action thriller due to be released on September 17th with his co-star Alexis Louder. “Weirdly, I had Copshop in my back pocket for quite a while,” Bulter said. “I just wasn’t sure if I was gonna go that way. It was in the middle of the pandemic, and I thought… you know what? This actually feels like the kind of movie where it can be outrageous, irreverent and a lot of fun, just complete escapism.”

“For me to get a chance to go play the villain, the hitman, a killer, brutal, but with some surprising elements to his character… you put all these crazy people into the one room essentially and have this stand-off, I thought we could get something that could be really fun, thrilling, exciting, scary, outrageous, surreal and then end up with complete mayhem. How can you not want to see that?”

Louder was grateful for the opportunity to fight and shoot with seasoned action performers. ‘It was a lot of fun to be able to work with the people I’m working with: Gerard Butler, Frank Grillo and Joe, all of them were like colleagues, they treated me like a peer. Whatever I needed to learn or know, they were very generous with the information they had in their back pocket,’ she said.

After Butler mentioned his 2009 sci-fi film Gamer, the discussion took a slight detour. Butler was asked if he had watched Ryan Reynolds’ Free Guy, and he immediately answered, “I actually don’t know what Free Guy is.” Looper informed him that it was Reynold’s latest film in between laughing takes as he quipped, “Oh s–t is it… I don’t watch Ryan Reynolds movies.”

“I was hoping it was of the time, that people would get it. I thought it was genius. It could have been executed slightly differently, but I really loved the commentary it was making on where the world was going, especially in gaming and sort of losing ourselves into that world, and technology and man bonding with machine. But, I didn’t feel people really did get it at the time. It didn’t do amazing business. It has become a bit of a cult classic, but I didn’t know about this resurgence” he added.

The Copshop synopsis reads, “Screaming through the Nevada desert in a bullet-ridden Crown Vic, wily con artist Teddy Murretto (Frank Grillo) hatches a desperate plan to hide out from lethal hitman Bob Viddick (Gerard Butler): He sucker-punches rookie officer Valerie Young (Alexis Louder) to get himself arrested and locked up in a small-town police station. But jail can’t protect Murretto for long. Viddick schemes his own way into detention, biding his time in a nearby cell until he can complete his mission. When the arrival of a competing assassin (Toby Huss) ignites all-out mayhem, mounting threats force Viddick to get creative if he wants to finish the job and escape the explosive situation.”

With the debut of Free Guy, in which Reynolds plays an NPC in an open-world, GTA-style game, Slash Film’s Chris Evangelista quipped in August that he couldn’t wait for the “original Free Guy” by tweeting a Gamer poster. It’s made a comeback this year, with Polygon claiming that it was ahead of its time in our “terminally online existence.”