[extropy-chat] Passion: If Mel Gibson were really a circus freak

[Damien Broderick]

At 10:33 AM 3/11/2004 -0800, Mike wrote:

>Do you even know Mel's personal story,
>about why he is as devout as he is and why he made the movie? Turns out
>he was not always so handsome as he allegedly is. It's all plastic
>surgery, as he was once beaten to an inch of death by a gang, had no
>face left, and was nothing but a circus freak. He met a priest

I assume that Mike's pulling your leg and chuckling to himself, but of 
course this isn't true. Hasn't anyone in the USA seen the Peter Weir movie 
GALLIPOLI (1981), where the handsome young acting student Mel Gibson 
performed as a `larrikin' hero in the First World War?  See, eg, 
http://www.movieline.com/reviews/GibsonM_Gallipoli.shtml

Here's a comment from the net about that urban legend:

< Like many such forwarded stories, it has a little basis in fact, but the 
entirety of the story is fiction. The factual part is that Mel Gibson was 
beaten severely not long before auditioning for the role of Mad Max; he 
still had many of the bruises, etc. George Miller liked the look, told him 
to come back when the bruises healed, and when he did, hired him to play 
Mad Max. That's the story that both Mel Gibson and George Miller have told 
in the past. >

Damien Broderick