Advertisement

Has Hollywood forgiven Mel Gibson?

Mel Gibson's career has one thing going for it... he's Mel Gibson.

Mel Gibson at the premiere of new movie Machette Kills (Credit: Rex)

Hollywood doesn’t care if you’re rude. It doesn’t care if you’re mean. It doesn’t particularly care if you’re a drunk, a drug addict, even a violent felon – as long as you make money for them.

For a long, long time, Mel Gibson made a lot of money for film studios. He helped define the buddy genre in the ‘Lethal Weapon’ series. He starred in one of M. Night Shyamalan’s good early films. And perhaps most impressively, he straddled the line – much like George Clooney does now – between weekend blockbuster entertainment like ‘Ransom’ and award fodder such as ‘Braveheart’, which personally earned him two Oscars.

And then of course there was ‘The Passion Of The Christ’, the worldwide box office gross of which currently stands at $604 million (£378m). That kind of cash buys a lot of goodwill.


Nevertheless, Gibson’s anti-Semitic rant at a police officer on July 28th, 2006 after being pulled over for driving erratically in Malibu was tabloid heaven. Then in 2010, he was investigated for domestic violence against Oksana Grigorieva, his ex-girlfriend and mother of his baby daughter, after she accused him of such and tapes were leaked of him appearing to angrily shout discriminatory insults at her.

[How disgraced movie stars made their comebacks]


For most people, just one of these controversies would have spelled the end of the their career. Of course, Mel Gibson isn’t most people. By the time he spewed his racial epithets on the side of the freeway (for which he has apologised and attempted to pay penance), he had his money, his fame, his place in the cinematic hierarchy. That’s his luxury – that he didn’t make his mistake earlier, when a brief enforced absence from the screen would have been calamitous enough to see him usurped by dozens of other similar, ambitious leading men.

He was also able to explain away his behaviour and there were lots of people willing to help him do so. For starters, Gibson admitted to a long-time alcohol problem and subsequently attended self-help groups. Supporters pointed to his father Hutton, a right-wing, hard line Catholic who had previously been dubbed a Holocaust denier. As far as Oksana, she was considered a gold-digger, alleged to be a liar desperately trying to make Gibson look bad to gain custody of their daughter and get a bigger payoff. In other words, none of it was really Mel’s fault.


Instead, he’s a household name. That certainly made his humiliation more public, but he’s in a business where marketing is everything, even if the strategy is tacitly saying, “come see that guy who screwed up back on the big screen!”

He also had another thing going for him – talent. It’s sometimes easy to forget that Gibson is a genuinely good actor. Sure he can do the happy-go-lucky hero like any great movie star. But anyone who’s seen ‘Mad Max’, ‘Gallipoli’ or ‘The Year Of Living Dangerously’ will find it difficult to deny he’s got skills.

[Norman reveals clash with Gibson]


His rehabilitation has also been speeded up thanks to his high-powered friends. Jodie Foster cast him as the lead in 2011’s ‘The Beaver’ (another accomplished and compelling performance in a slightly bizarre film) whilst Warner Bros. were happy for him to star in 2010’s ‘Edge Of Darkness’.

He will feature opposite Sylvester Stallone in next year’s ‘The Expendables 3’ and he’s part of the all star cast of Robert Rodriguez’s sequel ‘Machete Kills’.


Even if there are hundreds of filmmakers who would still be appalled to work with him, there are just as many who want to Tarantino him (def. “to Tarantino” – taking a seemingly washed-up actor and giving him a new lease of life on screen).

Looking at his career now, the overriding sense you get with his choices is that he’s doing exactly what he likes with who he likes. Money is no object, he doesn’t have to protect an image. He is free to do as he wants. For an actor, that’s actually a rare opportunity.

Has Hollywood forgiven Mel Gibson? Of course it has. Because in its eyes, there wasn’t all that much to forgive in the first place.

You know who agrees? Mel Gibson. He told Coming Soon in 2012, “It’s kind of hard to pinpoint exactly what needs to be forgiven and I don’t consider that anything does [need to be forgiven] because I didn’t hurt anyone.”

So there.

See Mel in action in the latest trailer for 'Machete Kills' (out now in the UK), below.