Butler Injected With Bee Venom For “Geostorm”
Gerard Butler is kind of crazy, and certainly willing to go the extra length to take on a challenge such as he did for this week’s weather global disaster film “Geostorm”.
Appearing on ITV’s “Lorraine” in the UK (via
Cinema Blend), Butler spoke about his time on the set of the Dean Devlin directed sci-fi film and says that he went so far as to inject himself with bee venom for the shoot because he’d heard of its medicinal qualities.
Injections of the natural toxin are used to treat numerous conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, neuralgia, tendonitis, fibromyositis, enthesitis and MS. As a bunch of the film’s shoot involved him wearing a heavy space suit for hours at a time, he was after something that would ease muscle pain. Then things went wrong:
“I had heard of this guy who injected bee venom, because apparently it has many anti-inflammatory compounds. So, I’m like, ‘Come, come to New Orleans where we’re filming.’ So, he gives me a shot, and I go, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ because it stings. Then he gives me 10 shots, and then I have the worst reaction. I kind of enter this anaphylactic shock. It was terrible. It was awful, creepy crawlies all over me, swelled up, heart’s going to explode. But I got through it, and then I find out he gave me 10 times too much.”
The bee venom treatment is normally a ten-week process, but whomever applied it decided to give the actor all ten shots at once. A few weeks later he went ahead and had the treatment again, this time he was sure to only get the appropriate dose. That didn’t help though as he still ended up back in hospital.
“Geostorm” opens in cinemas today.
