Mel Gibson axed from Chicken Run sequel over Winona Ryder claims - NEWS.com.au

Mad Max has been given the axe.

Mel Gibson won’t be reprising his role in Netflix’s highly anticipated Chicken Run sequel, sources with knowledge of the production told The Wrap.

The decision comes after Winona Ryder accused the 64-year-old Braveheart star of levelling anti-Semitic remarks at her during a 1995 Hollywood soiree – and subsequent calls for his cancellation on social media.

Ryder has alleged that the 64-year-old actor made an anti-Semitic slur at her while they were at a party in 1995. The Stranger Things star dropped the bombshell, which was first reported by GQ in 2010, while discussing her experiences with anti-Semitism in Hollywood in an interview with the UK-based Sunday Times.

“We were at a crowded party with one of my good friends, and Mel Gibson was smoking a cigar,” Ryder, 48, told the news outlet. She added that something came up about the Jewish faith, at which point the Mad Max actor said, “You’re not an oven dodger, are you?” – an apparent reference to the way Jewish prisoners were incinerated in Nazi death camps.

At the same industry soiree, Ryder claims Gibson asked her friend, who is gay, “‘Oh, wait, am I gonna get AIDS?’” She’s also alleged that he later tried to apologise for his offensive statements.

The Oscar-winning director’s representatives have since denied Ryder’s allegations in an emailed statement to The Post.

“This is 100 per cent untrue,” they said, also claiming that the Stranger Things star lied in the 2010 GQ article in which she first mentioned the alleged incident.

In the same interview, the Reality Bites star also claimed that an unnamed studio head said she “looked too Jewish” to star as a member of a blue-blooded family featured in an unspecified period piece she was shooting years ago.

Gibson was first accused of making anti-Semitic remarks in 2006, when he was stopped for a DUI near Malibu, California. The actor-director told a police officer, “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,” and referred to the female police officer on the scene as “sugar tits”.

That wasn’t the first time Gibson’s rants ruffled feathers. People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” of 1985 infamously made homophobic comments to a Spanish newspaper in 1991, and said he wanted New York Times writer Frank Rich’s “intestines on a stick” after the critic skewered his biblical movie The Passion Of The Christ.

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In Gibson’s most notorious incident in 2010, tapes surfaced of epic misogynistic and racist tirades recorded by former girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, with quotes including, “If you get raped by a pack of (N-words), it will be your fault.”

Grigorieva claimed he had punched her in the head and face on multiple occasions. Gibson pleaded no contest to a charge of misdemeanour battery in 2011 and served no jail time.

The Oscar-winner’s father, the late author Hutton Red Gibson, once gave an interview in which he declared the Holocaust “fiction”.

In the original Chicken Run from 2000, Gibson voiced the character of Rocky, a plucky clucker who helped his fine-feathered friends fly the coop before it could be turned into a chicken pot pie factory.

The “chick”-flick became the highest-grossing stop-motion-animation film of all time when it came out, and secured BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations.

It’s unclear if the rest of the original cast, which includes Julia Sawalha, Phil Daniels, Imelda Staunton and Timothy Spall, will be returning to the 20-years-in-the-making sequel.

However, filling the director’s chair is Sam Fell, who directed Dreamworks’ and Aardman’s 2006 animated comedy Flushed Away.

Production on the second coming of Chicken Run is slated to begin next year, according to Netflix.

This story originally appeared on the New York Post and is republished here with permission

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2020-06-23 23:16:46Z
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