Excerpt from Playgirl, May 1990. The eyes are extraordinary. Surprisingly piercing and bright aquamarine, they’re the first thing you notice. For all the tabloid trumpeting about “The Sexiest Man Alive,” “The Hollywood Heartthrob,” “Mel the Magnificent” and “The Australian Superhunk,” there’s no denying Mel Gibson’s unique physical presence. Yet, dressed casually in jeans and a loose patterned shirt, he also appears smaller and more compact than his screen image in such films as Lethal Weapon, Mad Max or Tequila Sunrise might suggest.
Most surprising of all, however, is his manner. Despite his sheer physical beauty, there’s no sense of self-importance in the man. At least, not on this morning in Vancouver, where he’s filming his new picture, Bird on a Wire, with Goldie Hawn.
He does love to make others laugh, however—and to laugh at himself. He lights up the first of many cigarettes, rubs his chin, crosses his eyes and, banging his head with his fist, knocks them back into place.
It’s a disconcerting but effective display of clowning that helps undermine his serious sex symbol image. And as unlikely as it may sound, it matches his gag-ridden performance in last year’s blockbuster, Lethal Weapon 2. When he’s not pulling faces or tossing off improvised one-liners, Gibson impishly apes The Three Stooges. “I’ve always loved them, ever since I was a kid,” he admits happily. “I’m just a sucker for all that clowning around with plumbing tools and crowbars. It’s just so…” he searches for exactly the right word, “idiotic!”
Still, for all the clowning around off the set, the actor’s sex symbol status on screen appears to be impregnable. Gibson can poke as much fun at himself as he likes, but women aren’t fooled. When US magazine polled its readers for the sexiest stars of 1989, the 34-year-old Gibson was voted Number One, easily beating out such formidable competition as Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner and Tom Selleck.
So what’s his secret? “Damned if I know!” says Gibson. “It’s pretty weird being called ‘The Sexiest Man in Hollywood’ or wherever. I mean, it’s a lot to live up to. Some mornings…,” he pauses slightly and begins to cross his eyes to let you know he’s not quite serious here, “…some mornings, I can barely get out of bed for worrying about it. Am I still as sexy as I was yesterday? Will I be even sexier tomorrow?”
Gibson laughs and drags hard from his cigarette. “Nah, I don’t really concern myself with stuff like that too much. To be honest, I don’t even think of myself as that good-looking, you know? I’ve got a sort of beat-up look and my nose is bent. So I’m not sure what people mean when they say I’m this great sex symbol. What’s far more important to me is that Robyn, my wife, still thinks I’m sexy.”
Much to the dismay of his many female fans, the actor has been happily married to Robyn, an ex-nurse, for the past nine years, and he makes no secret that he’s a family man at heart. The couple has five children, ranging in age from two to 10—Hannah, twins Edward and Christian, and Will and Louis—and apparently has no plans to stop at five. “Neither of us believe in birth control, so we’ll probably be having more kids,” states Gibson, who was brought up a devout Catholic. “We can afford to have ’em, so why not? I love children and big families and my attitude is, the more the merrier.”
Given such sentiments, it’s hardly surprising to find that Gibson comes from a large family himself. He was the sixth of eleven children, born in Peekskill, New York, in January 1956. His father worked for the railroads and his mother was a singer. Both sides of the family had originated in Ireland, and his solid, no-nonsense Catholic upbringing has helped him withstand the turbulence of Hollywood.
“It was a strict religious upbringing, but I have no regrets,” he states. “Religion is still very much a force in my life today, and it’s given me a lot of stability. I think without it I’d have been dead and buried long ago.”
When he was 12, his father received a settlement for a work-related injury, and suddenly decided to move the whole family to Sydney, Australia. It apparently was quite a cultural wrench for the shy teenager. “Australia took a bit of getting used to,” he admits. “If they like you there, they tease you a lot, and I didn’t quite know how to deal with it at first.”
Neither did the young Gibson have much idea about what he wanted to do after leaving high school. “I had a vague notion to get into journalism,” he says. “One thing’s for sure, though. I had no ambition to become an actor. I didn’t even do any plays at school.”
In the end, it was his sister who decided his fate. She secretly submitted an application in his name to the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney. Much to his surprise, Gibson passed the audition. To hear Gibson tell it, he was a terrible student.
“The first time I appeared in a play and had to speak, I was so nervous I could hardly stand up,” he laughs.
Fortunately for his future fans, others had more confidence in Gibson’s abilities. In 1977, he appeared in his first role in a surfing flick called Summer City. While it didn’t exactly set the box office on fire (it wasn’t even released outside Australia), it did bring him to the attention of Australian director George Miller, who happened to be looking for the lead in the low-budget action film, Mad Max. Miller saw just the qualities he wanted in Gibson’s rugged handsomeness, and even though Mad Max flopped in America when it was released in 1979, it had already defined the actor’s star qualities and tough but curiously vulnerable image.
Since then, he has built up a body of work that has capitalized on that image, including the two very successful sequels to Mad Max—The Road Warrior and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. He’s also starred in The Year of Living Dangerously, The Bounty, Mrs. Soffel, The River, Lethal Weapon and Tequila Sunrise.
Four of those films, The Bounty, Mrs. Soffel, The River and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, were made within one year, and eventually the punishing pace took its toll. Reports began to surface that Gibson was drinking too hard —he was fined for drunk driving while shooting Mrs. Soffel in 1984—and worse, that he was becoming rude and hostile, especially towards the press.
“Yeah, I did call certain people ‘parasites’” he admits today, “and I was in a lousy mood—probably for the whole year. I was just overtired but I didn’t know it, and I just took it out on whoever was around me.”
In the end, the actor retreated back to his 800-acre ranch in Australia to cool out for 18 months, and when he returned to Hollywood at the end of 1986 to start filming Lethal Weapon, everything was back in perspective.
Since that success, Gibson has been more in demand than ever, but he’s learned how to pace himself now and juggle the demands of fame and a private life. “I bring my family on location with me, and that helps keep me down to earth. And I’ve begun to realize that you can get somewhere faster sometimes if you slow down a bit and relax more.
“You know, it’s much easier for me to cope with all the celebrity stuff now. In fact, I don’t really give a damn. That’s the way you have to look at all that stuff. You can’t let it bother you too much. I’m much more interested in my work than how popular I am…
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