We’re in a weird place culturally in Hollywood. Many in Tinseltown want to combat rampant and increased antisemitism—look at the Jonathan Glazer comments during the Oscars— and yet many still tolerate folks like Mel Gibson, seemingly a notable exception in the industry, perhaps because he was such a beloved figure at one point.
Notoriously, the actor/director faced scrutiny and harsh criticism following an infamous DUI report in 2006. According to that report, during Gibson’s arrest, he went on a brutal sexist, racist, and antisemitic tirade while being arrested for suspected drunk driving. But that didn’t cancel him. Gibson was showered with support for his 2016 film, “Hacksaw Ridge,” which was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture, and won two prizes (Best Editing and Best Sound Mixing). And it really wasn’t until after the #MeToo movement that Gibson was retroactively truly treated punitively by Hollywood.
Gibson would later receive support from Robert Downey Jr. (his co-star in the 1990 action flick “Air America”), who faced his own substance issues and eventually climbed back thanks to Marvel Studios giving him a shot with the “Iron Man” role alongside his newfound sobriety. Gibson has now praised Downey Jr. for his support while speaking with Esquire in a profile of the recent Oscar-winner, who won Best Supporting Actor for his performance in “Oppenheimer.”
“One time, I got into a bit of a sticky situation where it kind of ended my career. I was drunk in the back of a police car, and I said some stupid shit, and all of a sudden: blacklisted. I’m the poster boy for canceled,” Gibson told Esquire, referring to, arguably glossing over, his 2006 arrest in Malibu for driving under the influence and the antisemitic comments he made. “A couple of years into that, [Downey] invited me to some kind of award he was getting—we always had this kind of seesaw thing, where if he was on the wagon, I was falling off, and if I was on the wagon, he was falling off. So, I was pretty much nonexistent in Hollywood at the time, and he stood up and spoke for me. It was a bold, generous, and kind gesture. I loved him for that.”
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While this show of empathy, generosity, understanding, and forgiveness between two men who shared a lot of demons is somewhat heartening, Gibson’s drunken statements weren’t an isolated incident but a rather disturbing and seemingly part of an established pattern of abuse and hate towards others.
During the #Metoo age of consequence (where people finally felt free to share stories about past bad behavior), actress Winona Ryder recalled the Oscar-winning director once referring to her and fellow Jews as “oven dodgers” (a tasteless antisemitic joke at the expense of Holocaust survivors and the six million killed by Nazis) at a party. There was an equally disturbing leaked transcript/audio recording of Gibson using the n-word during a threatening confrontation call with his ex-partner Oksana Grigorieva (who also claimed he would hit her, and Gibson proudly admitted to assaulting her). The racist epithets Gibson shouted in the call with his ex and the mother of his child are so harsh that they’re just not even worth repeating here.
After Gibson’s “Hacksaw Ridge” praise, era he would receive some high-profile offers from Warner Bros., including helming a remake of the classic violent Western “The Wild Bunch” with many high-profile actors lining up to appear in it and replacing the late director Richard Donner on “Lethal Weapon 5,” (though it seems as though both of those projects are long dead).
Gibson is currently directing the Lionsgate film “Flight Risk,” which stars Mark Wahlberg (“Uncharted”), Topher Grace (“Interstellar”), and Michelle Dockery (“The Gentlemen”). It marks his first directorial effort since 2016’s “Hacksaw Ridge” as he’s been chiefly relegated to smaller acting gigs since then. However, he did have a somewhat significant role in “John Wick” spin-off “The Continental” last year.