The edge of darkness

MEL GIBSON is fiddling with an electronic cigarette and looking far from at ease.

In one of his first, non-court related public appearances since the leaking last summer of the score of threatening phone calls he made to his then girlfriend Oksana Griegorieva, he is sitting down with the Irish Examiner in Beverly Hills, ostensibly to talk about his new movie The Beaver. The small matter of the large elephant in the room makes this a tense interview before it’s even begun and it’s not clear how far it will be safe to go, lest he storm out of the room.

When I last met Gibson in January of last year, he was also pretty agitated and confessed that it had been five days since he’d last smoked a cigarette and by his own admission, he was “just past the axe murderer phase”. He was tense and irritable throughout that one hour encounter and as I later learned, this was also the night he would make the series of enraged and terrifying phone calls to his then girlfriend and mother of his baby daughter.