March 11, 2008 - Nim’s Island might be a PG-rated family-friendly movie, but Scottish actor Gerard Butler’s female co-stars Abigail Breslin and Jodie Foster say the actor’s language on the set sometimes ventured into R-rated territory. In fact, Butler was a frequent contributor to the curse jar on the film’s set. “Well, all together with everybody we made a $150. We donated it to the RSPCA, which is the ASPCA in Australia,” said Breslin at the film’s Los Angeles press junket. “One of the things he did was that he'd swear and I'd say to him, 'You have to pay me.' It built up to like $12 and then he said to me, 'Oh, no. I'm going to give you $20 and so the next four times that I swear I don't have to pay you. I get them free.' I said, 'That's not the way it works…'”
Butler may have forked over funds to the curse jar on the Nim’s Island set, but two-time Oscar-winner Jodie Foster has taken it one step further and has a jar set up at home. “Oh, yeah. We have one at our house, a bad words jar. It's ridiculous. I don't know what's happened to me in the last six months, but I'm going to broke soon,” joked Foster.
Adding a few bucks now and then to the jar wasn’t Butler’s only contribution to Nim's Island. “First of all, he's hysterical,” said Foster. “He's a funny, funny, funny guy. He's sort of always performing and he's always giggling. And I love seeing him in this movie because he kind of makes fun of the characters that he's played in dramas. I think that we're both doing that in some ways. I'm making fun of my fearful characters and he's making fun of his big hero characters. I think it was a blast for us to do.”
Foster’s young co-star concurs with her assessment of the hugely popular star of such films as 300, Phantom of the Opera, and P.S. I Love You. “Gerard is really funny,” said 11-year-old Breslin. “We were walking up the steps one day on the deserted island that we were staying on. There was one lodge and we lived in tree houses. There were 109 steps up and there were Bush Rats and geckos and tree frogs. And we were walking up one night and we hear [hissing] and so we took the flashlight and we screamed. We looked up and it was just Gerard.”
