(Credit: YouTube / Alamy)
Sun 28 September 2025 18:15, UK
It seems like ancient history now, but once upon a time, Australian actor Mel Gibson was one of the biggest figures in Hollywood.
Finding fame with the Mad Max series, Gibson would land the starring role of the Lethal Weapon movies and enter the 1990s as a major box office draw. Inspired by his hero, Clint Eastwood, Gibson stepped behind the camera for 1993’s The Man Without a Face and sparked a significant second career as a director.
Jump to the 2010s, and alleged abusive recordings directed at his ex-wife, antisemitic invective caught on police camera during a DUI arrest, and rumours of often racist and homophobic remarks nearly struck his career dead overnight, only just limping tentatively into the limelight now, following his years-long name in mud.
Still, before his life’s ugly turn, Gibson was at the peak of his powers in 1995, unleashing his Braveheart historical epic to commercial success while rubbing historical experts the wrong way. A war film depicting 13th-century Scottish warrior William Wallace’s resistance against the English forces, Gibson’s epic would make millions across theatres all over the world, and inspire a loathed, 12-foot sandstone statue of Wallace in Gibson’s likeness by sculptor Tom Church, plonked in the car park of Stirling’s Wallace Monument and subject to routine vandalising, one local dubbing the tacky eyesore “a lump of crap”.
The production pulled no stops in Gibson’s lavish project. Recording James Horner’s score with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios, an attempt to listen to the track’s queues was interrupted by the noise of an unrelated documentary crew behind him, prompting a narked turn around to tell the rabble to shut up. Once his angry snap had been bellowed, he realised who he’d rollocked: Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr.
“They were all really hairy, and I was pretty clean-shaven, so I felt like the guest star on The Muppet Show,” Gibson curiously remarked to a recent meet and greet audience with the An Experience With series. “…I was actually tongue-tied and rather stunned because I was such a fan…”
Making a nuisance of themselves was The Beatles, in the middle of their Anthology TV and music archive documentary. Broadcast on ITV and overseeing three separate double albums of previously unheard studio outtakes and session cuts reaching as far back as the 1950s, the Anthology project was the only authorised examination of the group since Hunter Davies’s 1968 biography, and would largely remain the sole, official documentary The Beatles’ estate gave the OK to for years until the flurry of 2020s efforts with Disney+.
With the three together in the studio, the semi-reformed Beatles dusted off some old John Lennon vocals and cut the pretty good ‘Free as a Bird’ as well as the much more average ‘Real Love’, both a damn sight better than the AI-polished ‘Now and Then’ dropped in 2023.
Anyhow, Gibson at least made an impression, if feeling a little embarrassed. Considering his litany of controversies that dog him to this day, telling The Beatles to shut it should count as the least of his worries.
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