Mel Gibson

• 1. Introduction

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  Mel Gibson was paid $400 for his first film role, in Summer City, while he was still a drama student. A short time later, the title role in Mad Max paid him $9000. In the year 2000, Hollywood handed him a record $25 million to star in The Patriot.

  Between those paychecks lies a career with few parallels. An American-born boy raised in Australia became a leading action star. He then became a filmmaker who set big productions in ancient and indigenous tongues, and finally a man many studios refused to hire.

  What made audiences on two continents trust his face? Why did he cut back on acting to run the camera himself? And what brought the run to a halt?

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• 2. Peekskill To Adelaide

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  Mel Colm-Cille Gerard Gibson was born on the 3rd of January 1956 in Peekskill, New York, the sixth of 11 children. His father, Hutton Gibson, was a writer. His mother, Anne Patricia Reilly, was born in Ireland and died in 1990. His first name comes from St Mel's Cathedral in Longford, his mother's hometown. His younger brother Donal also became an actor.

  Eva Mylott, his paternal grandmother, was an opera contralto who lived from 1875 to 1920. She was born in Australia to Irish parents. His grandfather, John Hutton Gibson, was a millionaire tobacco businessman from the American South.

  On the 14th of February 1968, Hutton Gibson was awarded US$145,000 in a work-injury lawsuit against the New York Central Railroad. Soon afterward the family relocated to West Pymble, New South Wales. Mel was 12 years old. Money was one reason for the move to his grandmother's native Australia. The other was a way to keep his eldest brother out of the Vietnam War draft. At St Leo's Catholic College in Wahroonga, members of the Congregation of Christian Brothers taught him.

  At the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, Gibson played opposite Judy Davis in Romeo and Juliet. In an experimental staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream, he took the role of Queen Titania. After graduating in 1977 he went straight into the Mad Max shoot. He still kept returning to the stage, and joined the State Theatre Company of South Australia in Adelaide.

  His theatre credits include Estragon in Waiting for Godot, opposite Geoffrey Rush. In 1982 he played Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman in Sydney. His last stage performance came in 1993, in A. R. Gurney's Love Letters with Sissy Spacek in Telluride, Colorado.

  Gibson met Robyn Moore in Adelaide in 1977. She was a dental nurse, and he was an unknown actor. During this period they shared a $30-a-week apartment. On the 7th of June 1980, they married in a Catholic church in Forestville, New South Wales.

  Between stage jobs came smaller screen work. In the 1979 film Tim, Gibson played a mentally slow youth. On Australian television he was naval lieutenant Ray Henderson in The Sullivans, and he had parts in Cop Shop. He also appeared in the pilot of the prison serial Punishment, made in 1980 and screened in 1981.

  Mad Max, directed by George Miller, was independently financed. For its American release, the actors' Australian accents were dubbed over with American ones.

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• 3. From Gallipoli To Riggs

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  Peter Weir told Gibson at an earlier audition that he was too young for the part on offer. Weir said he simply wanted to meet him. A couple of years later he cast Gibson in Gallipoli, released in 1981. In Gibson's recollection, Weir chose him because he was not the archetypal Australian. Weir thought audiences needed someone from their own time to relate to.

  Mark Lee, a newcomer with an angelic look, played the idealistic Archy Hamilton. Gibson played Frank Dunne, an Irish-Australian drifter deeply cynical about fighting for the British Empire. The story follows young men from rural Western Australia who enlist in World War I and join the 1915 Gallipoli campaign. It builds to the Battle of the Nek, a catastrophic Australian offensive. Gibson later said the film was "Not really a war movie. That's just the backdrop. It's really the story of two young men." It won him the Best Actor award from the Australian Film Institute. It also earned him a reputation as a serious, versatile actor, and brought him the Hollywood agent Ed Limato.

  In 1982, Gibson played Guy Hamilton, a naive but ambitious journalist, in Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously. Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hunt co-starred, and the film adapted a novel by Christopher Koch. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "If this film doesn't make an international star of Mr. Gibson, then nothing will." Gibson himself called the character a puppet and did not see the part as a great challenge. MGM marketed him heavily anyway.

  Critics reached for the old movie legends. In 1982 Canby wrote that Gibson recalled the young Steve McQueen. Others likened him to a blend of Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. That same year Mad Max 2 became his first hit in America, where it was released as The Road Warrior.

  After a year away from acting following the birth of his twin sons, Gibson played Fletcher Christian in The Bounty in 1984. He followed Errol Flynn, Clark Gable and Marlon Brando in the role. The film is considered the most historically accurate version of the mutiny. Gibson thinks it did not go far enough, and says Christian should have been shown as the antagonist. He praised Anthony Hopkins as Lieutenant William Bligh as the best thing in the film.

  The River, also from 1984, was his first American film. He and Sissy Spacek played struggling Tennessee farmers. In Mrs. Soffel, directed by Gillian Armstrong, he and Matthew Modine played condemned convict brothers. Diane Keaton played the warden's wife who visits to read them the Bible. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in 1985 brought his first million-dollar salary.

  After four films in a row in 1985, Gibson spent almost two years at his Australian cattle station. He came back as Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon in 1987. Riggs is an LAPD detective, a recently widowed Vietnam veteran with a death wish. Danny Glover played his partner Roger Murtaugh, a reserved family man. From the second film, Joe Pesci joined as the hyperactive informant Leo Getz.

  Richard Donner directed and reunited the cast for three sequels, in 1989-1993 and 1998. The fourth film was called "the quintessence of the buddy cop pic." A television adaptation later aired for three seasons on FOX.

  Three films arrived in 1990: Bird on a Wire, Air America and Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet. For Hamlet, Gibson stood alongside seasoned Shakespeareans Ian Holm, Alan Bates and Paul Scofield. He compared working with Scofield to being "thrown into the ring with Mike Tyson". Scofield said of Gibson, "Not the sort of actor you'd think would make an ideal Hamlet, but he had enormous integrity and intelligence."

  Gibson also tried comedy, in Maverick in 1994 and What Women Want in 2000. For Disney's Pocahontas he supplied both the speaking and singing voice of John Smith. Jess Cagle of Time compared him with Cary Grant, Sean Connery and Robert Redford. Connery once suggested that Gibson play the next James Bond, with Connery as M. Gibson turned it down, reportedly because he feared being typecast.

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• 4. Behind The Camera

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  Robert Downey Jr. recalled that studio executives urged Gibson in 1989 to try directing. Gibson brushed the idea aside. That same year he and his partner Bruce Davey formed Icon Productions to make Hamlet. Icon grew into an international distributor and, in Australia and New Zealand, a film exhibitor.

  A Fox partnership called Fox-Icon fared worse. Launched in late 1996 at Fox Studios Australia in Sydney under the New Zealand producer Timothy White, it never produced a single film. It shut down in December 1999. For television, Gibson produced a Three Stooges biopic and the 2008 PBS documentary Carrier.

  The Man Without a Face in 1993 was his directing debut. Braveheart followed two years later, with Gibson producing and starring as Sir William Wallace. Wallace was a Scottish patriot executed in 1305 for high treason against King Edward I of England. The film won Gibson the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Director, and it took Best Picture. He became only the sixth actor-turned-filmmaker to win the directing Oscar. Critics rank the Battle of Stirling Bridge among the best-directed battle scenes on film. The film helped revive the historical epic.

  The gay rights group GLAAD attacked Braveheart for portraying the Prince of Wales as effeminate. It was especially angered by a scene in which Edward I throws his son's male lover from a castle window. Gibson replied that the killing had nothing to do with the man being gay, and called the king a psychopath who was "terrible to his son, to everybody." He added that a cut scene had explained the prince's plight, but it stalled the first act.

  The film's critics already had history with him. In December 1991, GLAAD accused Gibson of homophobia after an interview in the Spanish newspaper El País, in which he made derogatory remarks about gay people. He rejected calls to apologize. In January 1997 he joined GLAAD in hosting 10 lesbian and gay filmmakers for an on-location seminar on the set of Conspiracy Theory. By 1999 he said he should not have made the remarks, and blamed some vodka during the interview.

  Apocalypto in 2006 was Gibson's fourth film as director. It is set in Mesoamerica in the early 16th century, as a Maya civilization falls apart. Its sparse dialogue is spoken in Yucatec Maya by a cast of Native American descent. The film opens with a line from Will Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." Gibson said he wanted to make a point about how great civilizations decline, and about modern people facing the same forces. In the 2005 teaser trailer, he slipped in a single frame of himself smoking a cigarette.

  Gibson credits George Miller, Peter Weir and Richard Donner with teaching him filmmaking. On his own sets, he sometimes breaks the tension by having actors play serious scenes wearing a red clown nose. Helena Bonham Carter said, "He has a very basic sense of humor. It's a bit lavatorial and not very sophisticated." He also directed a few episodes of the ABC series Complete Savages.

  By the source's tally, Gibson has appeared in 65 films, directed six, produced 11 and written three. Films that starred him or that he directed have earned over US$2.5 billion in the United States alone.

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• 5. The Passion Storm

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  In September 2002, Gibson announced a film called The Passion, to be spoken in Aramaic and Latin with no subtitles. He hoped to "transcend language barriers with filmic storytelling". The finished film, The Passion of the Christ, reached theaters in 2004. He directed, produced, co-wrote and funded it, with Jim Caviezel as Jesus. It was shot exclusively in Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew, and Gibson relented on subtitles for theatrical release. Reviews ranged from high praise to condemnation of its violence.

  The Anti-Defamation League accused Gibson of antisemitism over the film's unflattering portrayal of Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin. Katha Pollitt of The Nation wrote that the priests were drawn with big noses and gnarly faces. She noted that the "good Jews" looked like Italian movie stars, among them Monica Bellucci as Magdalene. Orthodox Jewish rabbi Daniel Lapin and radio host Michael Medved defended the film.

  Gibson told The Globe and Mail, "Jesus died for the sins of all times, and I'll be the first on the line for culpability." The pressure still wore on him. After New York Times writer Frank Rich used Hutton Gibson's Holocaust denial to attack the film in print, Gibson answered with a violent threat against Rich. In a 2006 interview with Diane Sawyer, he said his "human rights were violated" by attacks on his person, family and beliefs.

  Gibson was raised a sedevacantist traditionalist Catholic, a group that rejects the validity of every pope since the Second Vatican Council. His father, Hutton, was an ardent sedevacantist, a Holocaust denier and a believer in conspiracy theories. During filming, Gibson had daily visits from local priests and from priests of the Institute of Christ the King in France. As of 2021 he attended the Church of the Holy Family, a traditionalist church in Southern California that he founded and funds.

  In a letter published on the 6th of July 2024, Gibson voiced full support for the excommunicated Italian archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. In a 2025 interview with Joe Rogan, he said he believed in Catholic Christianity "to the full."

  The Passion of the Christ grossed US$611,899,420 worldwide and $370,782,930 in the United States alone. It was at the time the seventh-highest-grossing film in American history and the highest-grossing R-rated film ever. It was nominated for three Academy Awards and won the People's Choice Award for Favorite Dramatic Motion Picture.

  In February 2008, the screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald sued Gibson, Icon Productions and others. He alleged they had defrauded him of millions of dollars and wrongly taken co-writing credit on the screenplay. In May 2009 Gibson agreed to an undisclosed settlement.

  In June 2016, Gibson announced a sequel with Braveheart screenwriter Randall Wallace, focused on the resurrection. That November, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he gave its title as The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection. He said it could "probably be three years off". In January 2023 it was reported that filming would begin later that year. The critic Matt Zoller Seitz had by then named Gibson "the pre-eminent religious filmmaker in the United States."

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• 6. Drink And Disgrace

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  Gibson has said he began drinking at the age of 13. In a 2002 interview for a documentary by his former classmate Sally McKenzie, he said, "I had really good highs but some very low lows."

  In 1984, he was banned from driving in Ontario, Canada, for three months after rear-ending a car in Toronto while drunk. He retreated to his Australian farm for more than a year, yet kept struggling. Richard Donner, who knew Gibson as professional and punctual, was shocked to hear he was drinking five pints of beer for breakfast.

  Reflecting in 2003 and 2004, Gibson said despair in his mid-30s led him to contemplate suicide. He meditated on Christ's Passion to heal his wounds. He took more time off acting in 1991 and sought professional help. That year his attorneys failed to stop the Sunday Mirror from publishing what he had shared at AA meetings. In 1992 he gave financial support to Hollywood's Recovery Center, saying that people do come back from alcoholism and that it is a miracle.

  On the 28th of July 2006, police in Malibu, California, arrested Gibson for drunken driving. He had been speeding, with an open container of liquor in the car. According to the arrest report, he erupted in a tirade when the officer would not let him drive home. The report said he made antisemitic remarks and asked whether the officer was Jewish.

  After the report leaked on TMZ.com, Gibson issued two apologies through his publicist. In a televised interview with Diane Sawyer, he confirmed the quotations were accurate. He called his behavior "despicable" and said the words were "blurted out in a moment of insanity". He asked to meet Jewish leaders to "discern the appropriate path for healing." His publicist said he had entered a recovery program.

  On the 17th of August 2006, he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor drunken-driving charge. The sentence was three years of probation. He had to attend self-help meetings five times a week for four and a half months, then three times a week for the rest of the first year. He also attended a First Offenders Program, paid a $1,300 fine, and had his license restricted for 90 days.

  Gibson and Robyn separated on the 29th of July 2006, after 26 years of marriage. In a 2011 interview, he said the separation began the day after his arrest. Robyn filed for divorce on the 13th of April 2009, citing irreconcilable differences. The filing followed photographs, published that March, that appeared to show him embracing his live-in girlfriend of one year. She was the Russian songwriter and pianist Oksana Grigorieva.

  The divorce was finalized on the 23rd of December 2011. The settlement was said to be the largest in Hollywood history, at over $400 million. The couple had no prenuptial agreement, and California is a community property state. Robyn therefore received half of everything he had earned during the marriage. They have one daughter and six sons, including twins, and seven grandchildren.

  Grigorieva later said Gibson wooed her with poetry. She said she accepted only after learning that he and his wife had been separated for more than 18 months. They appeared together on a red carpet on the 28th of April 2009. She already had a son with the actor Timothy Dalton. In October 2009, she gave birth to Gibson's eighth child, his second daughter.

  By April 2010 the couple had split. Grigorieva filed for a restraining order on the 21st of June 2010, and Gibson sought one against her on the 25th. She accused him of domestic violence, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department opened an investigation in July. On the 9th of July, audio recordings of a rant allegedly aimed at her were posted online. In them, a voice threatens to burn down her house while she is inside.

  Grigorieva said the voices were hers and Gibson's. Forensic experts questioned some of the tapes, but Gibson did not deny at the time that they were accurate. The agency William Morris Endeavor dropped him the same day. Robyn filed a court statement saying she had never experienced any abuse from him.

  In March 2011, Gibson agreed to plead no contest to a misdemeanor battery charge. In an April 2011 interview with Deadline Hollywood, he said the deal was a West Plea, which let him end the case while maintaining his innocence. He said he did it for his children and family, adding, "I'll take the hit and move on." Whoopi Goldberg and Jodie Foster, longtime friends, had spoken publicly in his defense.

  In August 2011, Gibson settled with Grigorieva. She was awarded $750,000, joint legal custody, and a house in Sherman Oaks, California, until their daughter Lucia turns 18. In 2013 she sued her own attorneys, claiming they had advised her to sign a bad agreement.

  Gibson began a relationship in 2014 with Rosalind Ross, a former champion equestrian vaulter and writer. Their son, Gibson's ninth child, was born in 2017. They separated in 2025.

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• 7. Blacklist And Return

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  Gibson was cast in a small role in The Hangover Part II, then removed after the cast and crew objected to his involvement. His controversial statements got him blacklisted in Hollywood for almost a decade. Edge of Darkness in 2010, adapted from a BBC miniseries, was his first starring role since 2002.

  The Beaver in 2011 was a domestic drama about a depressed alcoholic, directed by his Maverick co-star Jodie Foster. It premiered at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, on the 16th of March 2011. Its opening weekend in 22 theaters took in $104,000, a per-theater average of $4,745, and was considered a flop. Distributor Summit Entertainment dropped plans for a wide release and chose a limited art-house run. By the 5th of June 2011, Michael Cieply of The New York Times noted it had cleared about $1 million.

  Coverage before release focused on the overlap between the film's troubled lead and Gibson's own well-publicized problems. Time wrote that it was hard to separate his true-life story from what was happening onscreen. Foster suggested Americans are often uncomfortable with a dramedy.

  Gibson spent the following years in villain roles. He played Luther Voz in Machete Kills in 2013, opposite Danny Trejo. In 2014 he played Conrad Stonebanks in The Expendables 3, opposite Sylvester Stallone. In 2018 he led S. Craig Zahler's police brutality drama Dragged Across Concrete. He and the director both disowned The Professor and the Madman. He also collected a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor for Daddy's Home 2.

  In 2014, Robert Downey Jr. and the journalist Allison Hope Weiner both argued for forgiveness for Gibson. That same year Gibson signed on to direct Hacksaw Ridge, a World War II drama about the conscientious objector Desmond T. Doss, played by Andrew Garfield. It premiered at the 73rd Venice Film Festival in September 2016. The New Zealand Herald described the reviews as raves.

  Hacksaw Ridge earned six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director for Gibson and Best Actor for Garfield. It won two. It grossed $164 million worldwide, four times its production costs. The result was perceived as a thaw in Gibson's reputation, and it ended a 10-year absence from directing.

  In May 2023, Gibson was announced as director of Flight Risk, starring Mark Wahlberg as a pilot transporting a dangerous criminal for trial. Shooting began in Las Vegas on the 16th of June. As an independent project, it was exempted from the SAG-AFTRA strike. Lionsgate released it in the United States on the 24th of January 2025. Gibson was also credited as an executive producer of the 2023 film Sound of Freedom.

  Other projects remain on his list. In May 2018 he was announced for Destroyer, about the crew of the USS Laffey (DD-724), who defended their ship against 22 kamikaze attacks at Okinawa. In September 2018 he was announced for a remake of The Wild Bunch. He has long talked of Berserker, a Viking Age film with period languages, after Leonardo DiCaprio opted out.

  After Richard Donner died, Gibson said on the 15th of November 2021 that he would direct Lethal Weapon 5. He recalled Donner telling him, "Listen kid, if I kick the bucket you will do it." In June 2024, on the Inspire Me podcast, Gibson said Danny Glover would return as Murtaugh and he would play Riggs once more.

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• 8. Beyond The Screen

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  In 1985, People magazine named Gibson the first-ever Sexiest Man Alive. In 1995 he quietly declined France's Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, as a protest against France resuming nuclear testing in the Southwest Pacific. On the 25th of July 1997 he was named an honorary Officer of the Order of Australia for service to the Australian film industry. The award was honorary because substantive awards go only to Australian citizens.

  He holds dual Irish and American citizenship through his mother, and is an Australian permanent resident. Loyola Marymount University gave him an honorary doctorate in 2003. In 2004, Forbes called him the world's most powerful celebrity, and The Hollywood Reporter named him Innovator of the Year. The Irish Film and Television Awards gave him their Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema Award in 2008.

  In December 2004, Gibson sold his 300-acre farm in Australia's Kiewa Valley for $6 million. The same month he bought Mago Island in Fiji from Japan's Tokyu Corporation for $15 million. Descendants of the island's original inhabitants, displaced in the 1860s, protested the purchase. Gibson said he meant to keep the island's environment pristine.

  In early 2005 he sold his 45,000-acre Montana ranch to a neighbor. In April 2007 he bought a 400-acre ranch in Costa Rica for $26 million. In July 2007 he sold his 76-acre Tudor estate in Connecticut for $40 million, after buying it in 1994 for $9 million. Records of offshore accounts and businesses tied to him surfaced in the Jersey Leaks, which covered more than 20,000 people held by the wealth management firm Kleinwort Benson.

  Cris Embleton, a founder of Healing the Children, said Gibson and his former wife gave millions toward lifesaving medical treatment for needy children worldwide. They also helped restore Renaissance artwork and gave millions to NIDA. Gibson donated $500,000 to the El Mirador Basin Project, which aims to protect the last tract of virgin rain forest in Central America. In 2011 he said giving "gives you perspective", and called it uplifting to think about other people.

  In a July 1995 interview with Playboy, Gibson called President Bill Clinton a "low-level opportunist" and spoke of a conspiracy behind the Rhodes Scholarship. He later backed away, saying he had been asked for a conspiracy and then talked as if he believed it. In March 2005 he called Terri Schiavo's death "state-sanctioned murder". He questioned the Iraq War in March 2004.

  At the 2005 People's Choice Awards, Gibson praised Michael Moore and his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Icon had originally agreed to finance Moore's film, but sold the rights to Miramax Films. In 2016 he told Jorge Ramos that he had voted for neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton. In July 2021 he was recorded saluting Trump at UFC 264. In 2024 he endorsed Trump and made a disparaging remark about Kamala Harris.

  In January 2025, Gibson's Malibu home burned down in the Palisades Fire, and he criticized Governor Gavin Newsom's response. On the 16th of January 2025, president-elect Trump announced that Gibson, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone would serve as special ambassadors to Hollywood. Trump called them his "eyes and ears" and said he would act on their suggestions. Their duties were not specified.

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