Mel Gibson opened up about his life and career in a wide-ranging two-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, including how he creates his film roles.
“Sure, I’ve planned a lot of murders in my life — we all have,” Gibson, 69, said on the Thursday, January 9, episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, while discussing his upcoming project The Resurrection Of The Christ and how he develops story lines and characters. “In your head, you plan them and you think, ‘Well, that’s not a very good idea, but I think I can get away with it.’”
According to Gibson, committing an act of murder would be in “your animal brain.”
“I actually spent a long time in my animal brain, which is a very horrible place to be,” Gibson said. “[Where] you’re in ‘fight or flight’ all the time, you don’t even sleep. It’s really not a good place to be and if anybody looks at you the wrong way, you want to bite ‘em — and sometimes you say and do things that are socially unacceptable.”
The actor revealed that he even underwent a “brain scan” to understand his perspective.
“[The neurologist] looked at my brain and he was like, he opens the file … and he goes, ‘Are you OK?’” Gibson recalled. “He sat next to me, but very slowly and cautiously, and said, ‘No, you’re not. You’ve got the worst case of PTSD I have ever seen.’”
Gibson then “started to well up” over the doctor’s admission.
“He had a very miraculous and great remedy for it, which was to eat a bunch of fish oil, vitamin B complex and get into a hyperbaric chamber for 40 sessions — but make sure you do at least two or three a week,” he said. “It fixed my head, really. It got me out of that wacky place.”
After working with the doctor, Gibson found that he was less irritable — his brain trauma was the result of past injuries while playing rugby growing up — and eventually came to the realization that he didn’t want to follow through on any of his apparent murder plots.
“When I kill somebody, you know, it’s terrible and it’s not socially acceptable,” Gibson said. “Plus, I don’t want to go to prison.”
Gibson is now focused on his acting career, asserting to Rogan, 57, that he wants to tell a story about “good and evil.”
“It’s the resurrection story, but it’s not linear because it’s hard to understand,” he explained. “It’s got be put in a framework where you answer a few other questions as well and you have to juxtapose the event itself against everything itself so that it makes some kind of sense in a bigger picture, which is a hard thing to do.”
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