(Credits: Far Out / Saban Films)
Thu 20 November 2025 16:15, UK
If there’s one thing that Mel Gibson fears more than facing up to the consequences of his own actions, it’s the devil, and he thought he’d stumbled upon Satan himself when he worked with an actor he found to be almost supernaturally precocious.
Since slamming his fist on the self-destruct button two decades ago, the two-time Academy Award winner hasn’t managed to squeeze his way back into Hollywood’s good graces. He came pretty close with Hacksaw Ridge, but then it was back to the straight-to-video bargain bin. Forevermore, potentially.
If there was one way for Gibson to ease his way back into the mainstream, it was as a filmmaker, since his face being plastered on the big screen remains a difficult sell. Helming terrible Mark Wahlberg thrillers and Passion of the Christ sequels isn’t going to do it, but that’s apparently how he wants to spend his directorial career.
Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, the sunken A-lister is adamant that he’s “never discriminated against anyone or done anything that sort of supports that reputation.” Even if that was true, and there’s no shortage of people inside and outside of the industry who’d disagree, supporting nutty conspiracy theories and seeing the devil everywhere aren’t personality traits associated with A-listers.
When most folks see Christopher Walken, they think, ‘There’s Christopher Walken, the respected and eccentric actor’. When Mel Gibson saw Christopher Walken, he was convinced that he was standing in the presence of the Antichrist, because that’s how he opted to connect those particular dots.
Back in the early 1990s, when he was making his feature-length directorial debut on The Man Without a Face, he enlisted a young Nick Stahl to play Chuck Norstadt, a kid who wants to follow in his father’s footsteps by joining an esteemed military academy, where he gains a mentor in Gibson’s Justin McLeod, the titular faceless man.
It was the 12-year-old’s first appearance in a movie, and he won widespread acclaim for his performance. Almost too much acclaim for Gibson’s liking, after he revealed that he was convinced something sinister may have been afoot. “He’s really strong; this kid was diabolically good for his age,” he told Sandi David. “I kept looking for the 666 on the top of his head.”
Presumably, he didn’t find it, otherwise he’d have shit a brick and shut down the entire production. Since the dawn of the moving image, the industry has produced a steady pipeline of child actors who belie their tender years with towering performances, from Shirley Temple and Judy Garland to Macaulay Culkin and Leonardo DiCaprio. That’s how the business works, and the devil hasn’t got anything to do with it.
This being Gibson, though, his first thought was that an agent of Satan was standing in his midst, sent to the mortal plane to corrupt him by… giving a solid acting performance in a film that he directed. The man’s said some crazy things over the years, and growing suspicious of Stahl’s preternatural talents as a thespian may not even crack the upper echelons.
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