Mel Gibson has revealed why he turned down the opportunity to play the role of a lifetime, James Bond.
Bond has only been played by six men in the official franchise - Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, though numerous other big names have been linked to the role in the past.
By 1982, Gibson had already starred in two Mad Max movies and so his star was rising in Hollywood. By the end of the decade, he would be a superstar, having starred in two Lethal Weapon films.
However, things could have been very different for him, as he claims that he was offered the role of Bond 40 years ago which would have been between For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy.
Gibson says he turned it down as he didn't want to be typecast, citing Conner's struggles for decades as an example.
If somebody scores a few points and people dig it, it’s kind of inescapable at some point," he told JoBlo about being pigeonholed into a specific role.
"You make your bed and lie in it. Poor old Sean Connery couldn’t get away from James Bond for three decades. And then he started doing other stuff, like The Untouchables, and you realize, wow, there’s more to this guy than I thought. I got offered the James Bond movies when I was like twenty-six, which is like forty years ago, okay?
"And they said, hey, we want you to be the next James Bond.
"And I thought about it; I was in Australia, I was working with Peter Weir. And I did think about it, and I sort of turned it down – for that reason. Because I thought, look what happened to poor Sean, he got stuck there for like three decades."
Lethal Weapon 5 in development
In the same interview, Gibson revealed Lethal Weapon 5 is in development.
"It's (coming along) great, we've got a really good screenplay that I developed," he said.
"Well, Donner developed it, Richard Donner, of course, developed it with Richard Wenk, and they had a really good template.
"I had the honour of sitting down, after Richard passed away, with the writer and doing a couple more drafts and trying to do it in the spirit of what we thought Donner might (want), because I knew the guy so well.
"We tried to get that flavour, and we were pretty happy with what we came up with."
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