Last year, Mel Gibson made what was widely regarded as a triumphant comeback with Hacksaw Ridge, a war drama that eventually landed six Oscar nominations. It was the first sign that Hollywood might be willing to let the long-disgraced actor "back in the club."
But the real test comes with this week's Daddy's Home 2, which brings Gibson back in front of the camera for his first starring role in three years, and his first movie specifically aimed at families for the first time in more than a decade. Gibson plays Kurt, the badass father of the character played by Mark Wahlberg. In the run-up to the release of Daddy's Home 2, Gibson's role has been promoted with fawning clips like this:
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Daddy’s Home 2 is riffing on Gibson’s reputation as a Hollywood bad boy, so let’s review how Mel Gibson got that reputation in the first place. In 2006, he was arrested for driving 80 m.p.h. in a 45 m.p.h. zone with an open bottle of tequila in his car. When stopped, Gibson tried to run away. After he was detained, he said that "Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" and asked the arresting officer if he was a Jew. He also called a female police officer "sugar tits."
Four years later, Gibson was recorded making a series of horrific statements and threats to his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. He called her every misogynstic slur you can think of, and mixed those slurs with taunts of sexual violence: "I’ll burn the goddamn house down, but blow me first!" He alluded to her being "raped by a pack of niggers" for the way she dressed, and made a derisive reference to "wetbacks." When she accused him of hitting her in the face and knocking her front teeth out, he was recorded saying, "You fucking deserved it." Shortly after, he made a thinly veiled threat on her life: "I’m threatening. I'll put you in a fucking rose garden, you cunt. You understand that?"
All of this is a matter of public record. None of it is in dispute. You can read the whole thing here. So no, I’m not amused that Daddy’s Home 2 casts Gibson as a self-assured man’s man and all-around badass. Gibson is literally introduced descending an airport escalator in a beatific orange glow, winking at flight attendants and regaling his grandkids with jokes about dead hookers.
I’m sure Daddy’s Home 2 thinks it’s clever to cast Gibson, an actor widely known for his bad behavior off-screen, as Wahlberg’s bad-boy father. And with John Lithgow playing Will Ferrell’s cuddly teddy bear of a father, it’s easy enough to see where this is going: Lithgow will teach Gibson to be a little warmer, Gibson will teach Lithgow to be a little cooler.
But if Gibson’s character in Daddy’s Home 2 actually learns a lesson about the downsides of bullshit macho posturing, it’ll be one more lesson than Gibson seems to have learned in his actual life. You can argue, convincingly, that someone with an open track record of racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism can eventually earn a second chance. But while Gibson has gone to rehab, what’s most striking about his return to the spotlight is his apparent lack of remorse.
After the failure of B-movie junk like Get the Gringo and Machete Kills, Gibson largely withdrew from acting. His true comeback came with 2016’s overpraised Hacksaw Ridge: an overlong, unsubtle war movie that returned Gibson to the director’s chair for the first time in a decade.
During the promotional junket for Hacksaw Ridge—which eventually earned him a 10-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival and a Best Director nomination at the Oscars—Mel Gibson embarked on a remarkable non-apology tour. The Atlantic’s Megan Garber did an expert job parsing one noteworthy appearance on The Late Show, in which Gibson repeatedly minimized the many self-inflicted wounds that had maimed his career in the first place. When host Stephen Colbert asked Gibson about his "rough patches," Gibson corrected him to "rough patch." Gibson eventually referred, again euphemistically, to an incident 10 years earlier that wasn’t his "proudest moment"—completely failing to acknowledge the Oksana Grigorieva tapes that had been published four years after the drunk-driving arrest.
Gibson went on: "It’s a pity that one has to be defined with a label from, you know, having a nervous breakdown in the back of a police car from a bunch of double tequilas, but that’s what it is. Now, you know, this is not—that moment shouldn’t define the rest of my life."
Do you see what happened there? Mel Gibson managed to reframe the entire incident to make Mel Gibson the victim. It happened again, in that same breathless PR push for Hacksaw Ridge, in an interview with Variety:
Look at Gibson moving the goalposts in real time. Sure, he said all those awful things—but the real villain is the cop who recorded him. And the so-called "journalists" who accurately reported what he said. And anyway, he was having a nervous breakdown, so is it really fair to hold him accountable for a bunch of horrible things he said? Aren’t you the one who’s in the wrong here?
These are the worst kind of apologies—the kind, as my colleague Joshua Rivera recently noted, that say, "I’m sorry if you were offended," as if the real problem is anyone who doesn’t feel ready to welcome Mel Gibson back into the spotlight.
And then there’s the matter of the Oksana Grigorieva tapes. After the tapes were published, Gibson issued no statement on that subject for nearly a year, until he sat down for an interview with Deadline. When the subject of the tapes was raised, Gibson looked at the ceiling and shook his head and sighed. "Who anticipates being recorded? Who anticipates that? Who could anticipate such a personal betrayal?" Poor Mel Gibson. Treated so unfairly by the woman at whom he hurled nonstop verbal abuse in at least five phone calls.
Is Mel Gibson really such an invaluable cultural figure that we should forgive or tolerate or willfully ignore this pattern of behavior? Is anyone? Because even if Hacksaw Ridge or Daddy’s Home 2 or whatever Mel Gibson does next is unassailably brilliant: Who cares? Haven’t we spent the past month in a painful but long-overdue reckoning with the horrible shit Hollywood has always tolerated as the cost of doing business with a series of powerful, abusive men?
In the context of Harvey Weinstein et al, it’s worth noting there’s another part of Mel Gibson’s infamous drunk-driving arrest, which is routinely overshadowed by the sexism and the anti-Semitism. "I own Malibu. I’m going to fuck you," said Gibson to the arresting officer.
Mel Gibson thought he was going to get away with threatening to destroy the life of a non-celebrity—either because he thought it would get him off, or because he was actually willing to do it. The end result is the same: He didn’t think he deserved to face the consequences of the actions. It’s the same thing you can see on his proudly non-apologetic redemption tour over the past year, which has culminated in the smirking wink at his bad-boy persona in Daddy’s Home 2.
The team behind Daddy’s Home 2 couldn’t have known that their seemingly innocuous family comedy would come out in the midst of a firestorm about the abhorrent behavior of powerful men in Hollywood. But they certainly knew all about Mel Gibson’s past, and they cast him anyway. That’s shameful enough.