Mel Gibson has a reputation for being a lot of things, but practical joker is one that he would at least happily admit to. On more than one occasion, Gibson reportedly gifted women he worked with freeze-dried rats (including Julia Roberts), which apparently has something to do with the fact that he gets a kick out of making girls scream.
“He has this thing on a set where he has to impress someone, as if he was an unattractive 12-year-old-boy,” Gibson’s Maverick co-star Jodie Foster told Vanity Fair in 1997. “He goes out of his way to find some weird thing to impress somebody he doesn’t even know.”
But a dead rat is nothing compared to the prank he pulled on director Nancy Meyers when the two worked together on the 2000 romcom What Women Want. As Gibson explained to Conan O’Brien during a 2017 interview, he started off by taking a picture of himself sporting a realistic mask that made him look like an angry lumberjack. Gibson then had notices with the photo on them printed up saying that there was a dangerous man on the studio lot who should be reported to security immediately if seen. He placed the notices all around the set in the hopes that they would get Meyers’s attention.
The director allegedly got her revenge on Mel Gibson
Here’s the kicker: When shooting wrapped for the day, Gibson waited for Meyers in her office. Donning the mask from the picture, he motioned toward Meyers when she walked in with his hands outstretched as if he were about to strangle her. Meyers obviously didn’t find the situation as funny as Gibson did because she responded to the gag by stabbing Gibson about eight times with a blunt pencil. “She had the correct response,” O’Brien quipped after hearing the story. “What kind of prank is that?” Gibson went on to clarify, “It wasn’t for her to laugh, it was for my amusement.”
Evidently, this wasn’t the first time Gibson pulled a stunt like that, either. While being interviewed about her experience working with Gibson on 1992’s Forever Young, Jamie Lee Curtis revealed that Gibson once recruited Elijah Wood for a similar joke.
As Curtis tells it, she opened the door as they were filming one scene to find Gibson and Wood standing there wearing masks and holding knives. This makes a little more sense than the Meyers thing, though, considering that Curtis came up doing horror movies like Halloween. But by her own admission, Curtis was a bit of a prankster herself on the set and laughed about it while recounting the story.
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