Mel Gibson talks Mad Max casting

Mel Gibson landed the lead in Mad Max after a “very bad weekend”.

The 59-year-old actor shot to fame after he was cast as Max Rockatansky in the action movie series.

However, Mel has revealed the way he was cast in the film, and admitted his audition for the movie came after a “very bad weekend”.

But it was Mel’s unique appearance that first attracted movie bosses’ attention.

“I got into a brawl and I didn’t come out looking too pretty,” Mel said in a clip from the Blu-ray edition of the film, released to Entertainment Weekly. “I sort of took on half a rugby team and it didn’t work out too well on my end. I was looking pretty bad.”

Revealing he was “every colour of the rainbow”, Mel said the agency casting for the film took a few Polaroid pictures of him before telling him to come back in a few weeks when the bruises had cleared up.

When he did so, Mel admitted he would pretty desperate to land the role.

“I was a young actor and nobody had a job so I thought, ‘What the hell.,” he said. “That was an attraction enough. It could have been a commercial for toilet cleaner and I would have gone for it to earn a buck.”

When he returned for his audition, Mel identified himself by pointing at one of the bruised pictures on the wall.

He was then given a script to read, but admits it didn’t seem to matter to creator George Miller whether he remembered the lines or not.

“It was real weird,” he said. “He said, ‘Can you memorise this'’ and it was like two pages of dialogue with a big speech and stuff. I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ I went into the other room and just got a gist of what it was and I came out and just adlibbed what I could remember. I guess they bought it.”