After an eight-year absence from acting and a period of personal turmoil which left many in Hollywood wondering if he would ever work again, Mel Gibson is finally back. The 54-year-old Oscar-winning actor-director – for years one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars – returns Friday in his first major role since 2002, headlining the action thriller Edge of Darkness movie. Gibson’s re-emergence is the latest step on the road to rehabilitation which has followed his 2006 bust for drunken-driving and subsequent revelations of anti-Semitic remarks made to police during his arrest. The low point of that spectacular public shaming was followed by tabloid speculation about the state of the actor’s marriage, culminating in confirmation last year that his wife of nearly 30 years had filed for divorce.
While Gibson continued to write during his defacto exile, the Lethal Weapon and Braveheart star admitted he had considered never returning to acting during his absence. “Probably further towards the beginning but then as time went on I was like, Eh, maybe I should I try that again,” he told journalists at a Los Angeles press event, just a day before the release of Edge of Darkness movie on January 29. “You just don’t know and that’s why I did not make some big pronouncement like, I am quitting. I am retiring. I did not want to do that. I just thought that I would back away for a while. I was just tired and bored with it. I have just walked away and spent a year not doing it and doing something else. I think it is a natural thing. As soon as something starts getting a little tedious and you want to spice it up again you kind of have to change it up.”
Gibson’s last major role was in 2002′s Signs, M Night Shyamalan’s supernatural thriller. Gibson said he had felt “stale” after completing the film and decided to focus instead of directing, writing and producing. He received critical plaudits and stellar box office results with The Passion of the Christ in 2004 but struggled to emulate the success with 2006′s Apocalypto, an action movie about the ancient Mayans which was released only a few months after his alcohol-fueled arrest. Yet Gibson says he was bitten by the “acting bug” around the same time that he received the screenplay for Edge of Darkness, which had been adapted from the 1985 British television series of the same name. The film stars Gibson as a detective investigating the murder of his daughter, unraveling conspiracies and political intrigue along the way.