A large number of anecdotes and complex and not so complex topics could be seen in one of the most recent editions of the successful podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, which this time had as a guest the Australian actor, director and producer Mel Gibson, who does not appear very often in any space and less to speak so freely, due to his not so popular positions for the mainstream in which he developed for years.
Gibson told Joe Rogan and his audience another anecdote from the bumpy filming process of his five-time Oscar -winning 1995 film ‘Braveheart‘, in which he was almost sent to the other world by a horse and which he told the Irish Independent: “There was one horse that almost killed me. He had a good trick where he did all this rearing up, but he also fell backwards, which is a problem if you’ve fallen first and you’re behind him“.
The accident that almost cost Gibson his life
On this occasion, Gibson spoke of another moment that almost cost him his life and that had nothing to do with an animal, but with a miscalculation on his part on location, as he practically hanged himself by mistake, just directing the scene in which his character, the 13th century warrior William Wallace is hanged: “I got hanged by accident once. I was on a film set and I had my neck in a rope and I was directing the movie, so I was on a ladder and I thought ‘so I’ll be hanging here like this’ and the next thing I knew I was waking up and I was on the floor. There were all these people standing around looking at me and I said ‘what are you doing? Get to work!’. And they said ‘well, you hanged yourself’. I thought ‘wow’, you’re kidding. It happens in an instant and you don’t know it. It wasn’t painful, nothing.”
“It was super to go to the other realm”
Under Rogan’s watchful eye, Gibson acknowledged with great humor that he was knocked unconscious after the incident, but that thanks to the quick reaction of his production team he was able to get through it: “They grabbed me by the legs and took the rope off me. It was fun and I found out what it was like to go to the next realm,” he said.
Despite this couple of events, the filming of ‘Braveheart’ was not at all eventful as one might think due to the large number of action and battle scenes involving hundreds of elements, and Gibson again humorously described the ‘casualties’ in the process: “The injuries suffered by the cast were a broken ankle, a hangnail and a broken nose“.