The warning signs Mel Gibson was a terrible person long before he destroyed his own career
During his peak, Mel Gibson was one of the most popular and bankable stars in Hollywood, a position he’d maintained from the late 1980s right through to the early 2000s until a string of highly publicised incidents plunged his career into freefall.
For a time, it looked as though he could do no wrong, whether it was anchoring blockbuster hits like the Lethal Weapon franchise, Conspiracy Theory, Ransom, and What Women Want or becoming an Academy Award-winning director when he turned his attention behind the camera and triumphed at the Oscars with ‘Best Picture’-winning historical epic Braveheart.
These days, though, he’s been almost entirely consigned to a string of bargain basement action thrillers that almost never see the inside of a cinema. It’s a startling fall from grace that began with his arrest for driving under the influence and subsequent abuse of a police officer and compounded by the allegations and evidential voice recordings of his former partner, Oksana Grigorieva.
However, beneath the charming and charismatic A-list veneer, Gibson had been involved in a number of incidents long before that, ones that hinted there was always a raging temper ready to burst to the surface at a moment’s notice. The star’s long-running battle with alcoholism has often placed him on the losing side, but his struggles with the disease can’t be blamed for several unsavoury incidents that pre-date the ones that effectively killed his career.
As far back as 1984, Gibson revealed himself to be far from progressive when he described feminism as “a term invented by some woman who got jilted”. It’s easy to write that off as being the standard viewpoint of the time held by successful men, but he would later state in no uncertain terms that “men and women are not equal”. The example he used was a female business partner who didn’t work out because, in his words, “She was a cunt”.
He made blatantly homophobic remarks in an interview with Spanish newspaper El País in 1991, which he refused to apologise for. Although he’d later blame his denigrating comments towards the LGBTQ+ community on the fact he’d been “tickling a bit of vodka” at the time, his initial response was hardly that of someone seeking to atone for their mistakes. “I’m not apologising to anyone,” he said. “I’ll apologise when hell freezes over. They can fuck off.”
Gibson would latterly deny Winona Ryder’s assertions that he’d made both homophobic and antisemitic jokes at the expense of her and her friend in the 1990s, where he reportedly asked the Stranger Things star if she was “an oven-dodger” on account of her religion, something that’s even queasier knowing his father Hutton Gibson was a high-profile Holocaust denier who labelled one of history’s most horrific atrocities as being largely supported by the “fiction” corroborated by historians and scholars.
Even when he sought to make a movie about a prominent Jewish figure, he ended up being recorded unleashing an expletive-laden tirade on screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who’d been hired to pen the screenplay for a biographical drama about Judah Maccabee. What made it even more concerning was that it was the scribe’s 15-year-old son who made the recording, in which Gibson blasts his father for being “a filthy little cocksucker” who couldn’t deliver a draft on time.
Again, Gibson wrote it off by telling Jay Leno he had “a little bit of a temper,” which was obvious when he said of the writer behind a negative op-ed denouncing The Passion of the Christ: “I want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick. I want to kill his dog,” never mind the fact he threatened to “tear the fucking face right off” the author of an unauthorised biography he’d never even met.
With that in mind, perhaps Gibson’s downfall was inevitable because there’s only so long any person can say such inflammatory things on a regular basis without having it come back to haunt them. He’ll never be a mainstream concern again unless something drastic changes, but the two incidents that initially derailed him hardly came completely out of the blue.
