Mel Gibson Takes New Role: Real Life

Mel Gibson, the star of a string of blockbuster movies and one of Hollywood’s top box-office draws, is going home to Australia “to lead my own life instead of someone else’s.”

The star of the “Lethal Weapon” and “Road Warrior” series says he is so tired after years of nonstop work that he is incapable of making another movie.

“I’m going to take off 10 months or a year, if for no other reason than people must be getting sick of the sight of me,” he told Reuters in a recent interview.

“But seriously,” he added, “it’s just doing all these films. My state of mind says that I never want to do anything again, but I’m sure after a year off I’ll feel like it.

“It’s just the workload. I think if I had to make one more film, I couldn’t do it. Not right now. Not for about a year or so. I’m just too tired. I just want to go home.”

Asked where home was, the 34-year-old actor smiled ruefully and said, “I wish someone would tell me.”

Home for much of this year has been Scotland, where he filmed Shakespeare’s classic “Hamlet,” which Gibson called “the hardest damned thing I’ve ever done.”

Last year, home was Thailand, where he spent several months shooting “Air America,” his current release about the CIA’s secret air force and its operations in Laos during the Vietnam War.

Home in real life is a sprawling cattle ranch in the Australian state of Victoria.

“I’m not myself here,” he explained as he sipped black coffee in a luxury hotel in Los Angeles’ fashionable Westwood section. “You’re not seeing the real me.”

The real Gibson, he explained, likes nothing more than romping on the floor with his six children or spending his days working with cattle and studying the genetics of the bovine animals.