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Mel Gibson warning video about Hollywood resurfaces; actor meets with Trump, Roger Stone

July 10, 2023 | | Print Article

Actor Mel Gibson turned heads when he endorsed “The Sound of Freedom,” a film about child sex trafficking, based on the life of former DHS agent Tim Ballard, played by Jim Caviezel, who famously starred in Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”

Since its explosive release over the Fourth of July weekend — it beat out Disney’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at the box office — the media has gone into overdrive, attacking the film and everyone associated with it as paranoid, “QAnon-adjacent” conspiracy theorists.

But it turns out, Gibson was sounding the alarm bells over Hollywood long before QAnon was a thing.

An interview with Gibson from 1998 has resurfaced, and the Lethal Weapon star clearly knew something was amiss in Tinsel Town.

“First time I really came over here,” Gibson said of Hollywood 25 years ago, “you know, I had a bunch of weird paranoid suspicions about what the hell was going on because there was a lot of stuff I couldn’t understand. And nobody was really bothering to explain it to me.”

Gibson said he formed “opinions” about Hollywood “and the people in it” that made him think, “Surely that couldn’t be.”

Back then, Gibson painted an almost film noir picture of hushed voices and whispered warnings.

“And then you go away and you think, ‘No. That was wrong. I mean, that’s insane thinking. I’m paranoid. I imagined that stuff. That couldn’t be the reason for why so-and-so was acting, like, could it?” he recalled. “And then you find out later on the track that you were exactly on track with a lot of this stuff. That some of your worst nightmares were real.”

“It does rip your life to pieces if you let it,” he said. “It’s always pounding at the walls, these little guys, these little heathens with no soul downstairs with horns on their head.”

Getting mad, Gibson said, is not the right approach.

“You have to make a deal with everyone else, and it’s almost unspoken, that you are going to be f**ked over at some point by people who you may have done something nice for,” he said. “And it may happen that by circumstance or even very purposefully — and I’ve often felt that. I’ve sat there and I have felt the knife slipped firmly in between my shoulder blades and tried to have it shoved through the other side, through my heart.”

Gibson then went on to describe a surreal rooftop meeting in New York with “Chris Walken,” presumably referring to actor Christopher Walken.

“He floated in sideways,” Gibson said.

Clad in black, Walken reminded Gibson of “one of those old vampire movies where they don’t walk but they glide.”

The air got cold and “it was getting scary,” Gibson recalled.

“I turned around to avoid his steady gaze at one point, and I was looking at the building with the top of the sixes on it, so there was a huge illuminated triple six in red,” he said. “… And I thought, ‘Oh no! Chris Walken is the antichrist.”

On Saturday — in, of all places, Sin City — Gibson met with former President Donald Trump and Roger Stone backstage at UFC 290, sparking a flurry of online speculation, given the success of “The Sound of Freedom.”

“I bet @realDonaldTrump is going to help with Mel Gibson’s movie to fight and expose child trafficking!” exclaimed one Twitter user.


It isn’t such a far-fetched thought.

In 2019, then-President Trump appointed Ballard to be a member of the Public-Private Partnership Advisory Council to End Human Trafficking.

 

“You’ll resent it for a while, and then you have to let it go, otherwise you’ll eat yourself alive,” Gibson said in the 1998 video. “And I think it takes that kind of cockroach resilience to survive in this town.”

If Gibson was discussing a new project with Trump and Stone, there is at least one much-loved actor who might be on board.

When asked if he would ever work with Mel Gibson, conservative icon James Woods replied, “Mel Gibson co-wrote, produced and directed one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen: APOCALYPTO.”

“We had a text exchange just last night,” Woods revealed. “He’s directing a movie as we speak. And, yes, I would be honored to be in anything he created.”

Melissa Fine
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