The role Mel Gibson said he would only play for $90m: “I may be a lot of things, but I’m not mad”
There’s a lot to be said about how and why somebody earns a nickname that sticks with them throughout their life and career, which makes it nothing if not curious that Mel Gibson, who’s been called ‘Mad Mel’ since the 1980s, was once adamant that he was not, in fact, mad.
Admittedly, the tag was derived from his three-film stint as George Miller’s Max Rockatansky in the classic post-apocalyptic trilogy, but it quickly took on a deeper meaning when the actor and filmmaker continued to reveal that if he wasn’t mad, he definitely had a very short fuse and some questionable opinions.
If anything, he lived up to the moniker, since it’s perfectly on-brand for a guy called ‘Mad Mel’ to get into drunken barfights the night before shooting a movie that required him to hide one side of his face from the cameras, spout nonsensical conspiracy theories long before QAnon was a twinkle in the tinfoil hat brigade’s eye, and go on the record repeatedly making sexist, misogynistic, and homophobic remarks.
All of this happened before his publicised fall from grace when he was caught on tape spouting antisemitic tirades, but we do know that Bjorn the Viking, his unhinged alter-ego, is to blame. Or that’s the way he told it, which, again, shows him living up to the ‘Mad Mel’ billing and then some.
And yet, for a two-time Academy Award winner who’s flirted precariously with being nuttier than squirrel shite on a number of occasions, there was one role he wouldn’t play for any less than a mighty sum. Since this is Mel Gibson, you might think it was a character that went against his personal beliefs, professional instincts, or would force him to send himself to places he didn’t want to go to embrace the performance.
Nope, it was a billionaire who moonlights as a vigilante wearing a rubber suit so bulky that he can’t move his neck independently of his head. “Nah,” Gibson replied in July 1989 when the Phoenix New Times asked him if the rumours were true and he’d turned down the lead in Tim Burton’s Batman. “Not a chance.”
“Well, let’s put it this way,” he explained. “I’d have given it some serious consideration if they offered me a lot of money. $90 million? Sure, I’d have done it. I may be a lot of things, but I’m not mad.” When viewed through a modern lens, that might be one of the most ironic things the Lethal Weapon star has ever said.
The thing is, he did turn down the lead in Tim Burton’s Batman, which was confirmed by no less of a source than Mel Gibson, who revealed decades later that he’d been “offered the Batsuit three times” and rejected it on each count, possibly because nobody was willing to meet his exorbitant asking price.
That wasn’t just ‘Mad Mel’ saying he wasn’t mad enough to play the ‘Dark Knight’, it’s also ‘Mad Mel’ lying through his teeth, since it turned out that he was actually offered the gig, and more than once.
