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Mel Gibson: 'I Am Deeply Ashamed'

Originally posted Thursday August 03, 2006 12:00 PM EDT

Wife Robyn Moore (with Gibson in '97) "is a saint," Gibson told The New Yorker in 2003. "She is a much better person than I am." Photo by: PAUL SMITH / FEATURE FLASH / RETNA

Since then, Gibson has thrown himself into his next project – an admittedly esoteric movie about a Mayan warrior hero with a Native American cast. While in Veracruz, "the weather was often pretty bad, oppressive and raining, so Mel would get upset a lot," says actor Mauricio Amuy. "He'd be screaming at the cast." Two actors contend that Gibson sometimes launched into long discussions of his religious beliefs. "He sometimes started talking about how the Jews were at fault for the killing of Jesus," says Amuy. "I got the feeling he didn't like Jews." (Nierob, Gibson's rep, says that the actors misinterpreted Gibson and that Amuy was on-set for only three days.)

That comes as a surprise to friends – many of them Jewish – in California, who describe him as a good man who would pull over if your car broke down, as a strict but devoted father who has raised seven decent children, and as an irrepressible on-set joker who knows just the right moment to pull out the clown nose while filming Christ being flayed by the Romans.

"He was very excited about his [new] film," says longtime friend, Hollywood producer Dean Devlin, who saw Gibson the day of his arrest. "I recently had a baby, and he was going on about how great it is to have kids, how it changed his life." There was no sign Gibson had been drinking again. Says Devlin: "He must be going through hell."

It may be only the beginning. But if Gibson is convicted of DUI after leaving rehab, it's unlikely he'll get any jail time. "Malibu is not the toughest of courts," says Lawrence Taylor, an L.A. attorney who specializes in drunk-driving cases. "He'll probably get DUI school for a few months and be on probation for about three years. Legally, his alleged comments are irrelevant – a judge will likely not take that into consideration."

The damage to his career may take far longer to repair. "People are capable of horrors, of atrocities. We're also capable of wonderful things, of good things," Gibson told ABC in '04. "I'm somewhere between Howard Stern and St. Francis of Assisi on the scale of morality." Now those close to him are trying to help Gibson be the man he wants to be. "I like that he apologized," says old friend Tom Sherak. "And now he has to mean it."

• By Allison Adato. Ron Arias, Johnny Dodd, Michael Fleeman, Maureen Harrington, and Ken Lee in Los Angeles, K.C. Baker, Mary Green and Michelle Tan in New York City and Theresa Braine in Mexico City