Gerard Butler ‘burned out’ after filming ‘Machine Gun Preacher’

Washington: Gerard Butler has revealed that he felt “burned out” and “exhausted” after filming action biopic ‘Machine Gun Preacher’.

The 41-year-old actor admitted that he was “exhausted’’ by the end of recording the biopic, because of the hard-hitting storyline, for which he had to do gruesome research. ‘Machine Gun Preacher’ tells the story of a former drug-dealing biker Sam Childers, who found God and became a preacher to Sudanese orphans who had been forced to become soldiers. “I’ve seen footage of people being hacked to death. Usually when you finish a movie there’s this period of adjustment, but you come out of it with some buoyancy and excitement. Whereas with this, I felt burned out and exhausted,” Contactmusic quoted him as telling the Seven magazine. The 41-year-old star admitted that he felt much better following a trip to Sir Richard Branson’s safari lodge, post the filming, where he was able to take in the “restorative power” of being in the wild. “I’d brought some friends down to South Africa, where we’d been filming, and we were supposed to be going on safari, but I actually felt haunted, like, why would I want to be with people and look at animals? “But the strange thing was, I did go to Richard Branson’s safari lodge, actually, and I’ve got to say that the restorative power of being out in the wilds, standing five feet from an elephant walking past with her young, really did the trick,’’ he added. ANI