The controversial actor Mel Gibson is desperate to work with: “He can be a tricky customer”
While it’s not strictly true that nobody wants to work with Mel Gibson anymore, considering he’s been credited in 23 films as an actor, director, or producer in the last decade, it’s definitely accurate to say that not many people of note or renown have been banging down his door.
Since first hitting the self-destruct button on his mainstream career two decades ago, Gibson has never come close to recapturing his former position as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. In an industry where most sins can be forgiven, his repeated controversies seem to have made him a permanent exile.
The two-time Academy Award winner’s best shot at any kind of redemption appears to be from behind the camera, with the acclaimed Hacksaw Ridge earning him an Oscar nod for ‘Best Director’ to go along with a ‘Best Picture’ nod and two wins in the technical categories.
In fact, his most recent directorial effort, Flight Risk, opened at the top of the box office in the United States despite being terrible and completely omitting his name from the marketing, just in case anyone would refuse to see Mark Wahlberg hamming it up in a bald cap because Gibson was involved.
The long-gestating Lethal Weapon 5 would be an easy fix to continue mining modern audience’s obsession with nostalgia, but Gibson will instead be hoping that lightning strikes twice with his Passion of the Christ sequel, after the original became one of the highest-grossing independent releases of all time and made him a small fortune because nobody else wanted to fund the production.
While many high-profile names, including his longtime friend Robert Downey Jr and Hacksaw Ridge leading man Andrew Garfield, have called for Gibson to be granted clemency for his past sins, the fact that he’s spent almost 20 years on the outside looking in hints that his days have been numbered for a long time.
If there’s one thing that makes a film difficult to sell to the masses, it’s a problematic figurehead. If there’s anything that could make it even more difficult, it’s two of them. And yet, the actor Gibson singled out as the one he’d love to work with the most has been riding almost nothing but a wave of negativity for years.
“He can be kind of a tricky customer, but I love this kid Shia LaBeouf,” the actor and filmmaker told the crowd during a convention appearance in Orlando. “There’s something so truthful about what he does, and he gets into it.”
LaBeouf is undoubtedly a committed performer, albeit one who occasionally goes too far, as his antics on David Ayer’s Fury made clear, but like Gibson, he’s rarely near the top of anyone’s casting wish-list after his behaviour on and off set saw him join his number one fan on the outskirts of cinema.
The former Disney star is already friendly with Gibson, with LaBeouf crediting him with helping put him on the straight and narrow during his battles with alcoholism, but it remains to be seen if any studio or production company is willing to take a risk on pairing them up in a picture.
