Mel Gibson looms over himself. A gallery of movie posters hangs in his office at Icon Productions, his company with its headquarters on the Paramount lot in Hollywood. The Man Without a Face: Gibson in silhouette in the distance, the actor shadowed in his 1993 directorial debut. Ransom: closeup of Gibson, blue eyes blazing with righteous desperation. Maverick: James Garner, Jodie Foster and Gibson, all of them smiling, no doubt thinking about how much they were paid. On each poster, on each face, Gibson has added a mustache with a heavy black marker--a graphic display of his famously self-deprecating sense of humor. Foster, for one, never looked so dashing.
Not even these irreverent squiggles, however, can diminish the real testament of the posters: the enduring stardom; the genre jumping; the directing, producing and acting credits that have built his brilliant career during his two decades in the movie business. Yet even by his mammoth standards for success, this has been Gibson's year of living large. While last summer's Revolutionary War epic The Patriot wasn't the blockbuster Sony hoped for, it grossed more than $100 million in the U.S., thanks to Gibson's drawing power. He also provided his marquee value and inimitably cocky voice to the role of lead rooster in Chicken Run, his other summer hit. The winning streak is expected to continue this month with What Women Want, an undeniably, unabashedly commercial romantic comedy. If all goes as planned, Gibson will have starred in three $100 million grossers in 2000.
"Three in one year," says Gibson, nodding his head and smiling. "That would be interesting." Gibson is in his office, on a sofa beneath the lineup of defaced posters, and he doesn't look at all like the kind of fellow who can command $25 million a movie, his record-breaking salary for The Patriot. He is wearing the usual--jeans and an untucked short-sleeve patterned shirt that is, frankly, a little loud--and he is fumbling through the tattered leather backpack he always carries, looking desperately for a light. Gibson smokes. He has tried hypnotists and nicotine gum and such, but quitting remains perhaps the one thing Mel Gibson cannot do. At 44 he has won two Oscars (as director and producer of the 1995 Braveheart). He has been married to the same woman, Robyn Gibson, since 1980 and fathered seven children, including son Thomas, born last year. Through his 11-year-old company, he co-produced this year's well-received TV movie The Three Stooges, and he owns the foreign rights to What Women Want.
The star also acquits himself quite nicely in the film, which is notable not because it co-stars Helen Hunt (what doesn't co-star Helen Hunt these days?), but because it's Gibson's first foray into romantic comedy. "They haven't naturally come my way," he says when asked why he hasn't worked in this genre before. "I wouldn't be the first guy to choose for something like this." Actually, he was at the top of the wish lists of director Nancy Meyers and Paramount chairman Sherry Lansing. Meyers (who penned the 1991 Father of the Bride update and its sequel) had directed only one picture, the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap, but Gibson watched it and signed on. "I wouldn't naturally go see something like that," he says, "but I enjoyed it."