Mad Mel Swaps Sugar Tits For Sugar Loaf

That’s Rocky Valley, right…?

hen a star falls hard, there are many ways that the rich and once-famous, now-infamous can ease the pain.

They can head off to a country that time forgot and where people forgive – usually in deepest, darkest Asia – to live out their remaining years as a big fish in a small, adoring pond.

Alternatively, they can turn all that negative publicity into some kind of positive, and simply become a parody of their former selves, walking memes to be both loved and ridiculed at the same time. This is known in Hollywood circles as The David Hasselhoff Approach.

There are those, of course, who would rather go out fighting and biting, and generally being ever-more bonkers as their credibility fades away. This is known as The Nicolas Cage Effect.

Throw in religion, or Vegas, or The Shopping Channel, or simply hiding away in The Howard Hughes Home For The Faintly Bewildered, and it’s clear that life doesn’t have to be over even when your glittering career is.

For Mel Gibson, it’s going to be a long path back to happiness and sanity, after a career – and possibly mental – meltdown that began with a rant against the Jews and a rant in favour of Sugar Tits during a drunk-driving arrest on July 28th, 2006. Always outspoken about those he didn’t like, in 1991, Gibson was able to get away with derogatory remarks about homosexuals. Post-2006, and the collapse of his career, and it’s a little bit different.

When Gibson was recorded in July 2010 threatening the mother of his young daughter, suggesting that should she get “raped by a pack of niggers”, it would be her own fault, Hollywood wasn’t willing nor able to make such ugliness go away.

Having interviewed this highly opinionated Hollywood player a few times over the years, such outbursts hardly came as a surprise. Is it any wonder the media were happy to report his downfall?

At Three Qs

In Ireland for eight weeks, to shoot The Professor And The Madman alongside Sean Penn, Gibson is still slowly crawling from the career wreckage. Based on Simon Winchester’s eponymous novel about the man who compiled the first Oxford English Dictionary, Sir James Murray (Gibson), and the asylum-dweller, Dr WC Minor, who submitted over 10,000 entries, the last time he was making a film here, it was a slightly bigger deal. And budget.

When some climbers bumped into Gibson on top the Sugar Loaf mountain this week, you had to wonder what Mad Mel was doing up there. Maybe he was simply trying to be at one with nature, to breathe in the fresh Irish air and bask in the sweet, simple beauty of that panoramic view that takes in The Wicklow Hills, Newcastle, Bray, Sandymount, Howth, Delgany, Kilcoole and Greystones.

Then again, maybe Gibson was revisiting happier times, and former glories, his most famous film, the Oscar-winning, box-office-stomping Braveheart having been filmed out amongst our rolling hills.

As for his spot of brunch in Three Q’s – as spotted by local Karl Tracy here – maybe that was a sly nod to Chicken Run…?

Whatever the reason, here’s hoping we helped get Mel further on down that rocky road to recovery.

And if he sticks around long enough, we may even have a guest spot for him in Mad Max 5.