At the time of Mel Gibson’s July 2006 arrest for driving under the influence, he had just come back from shooting Apocalypto in Mexico, where he’d apparently started drinking again. According to one source, his first reaction when he was pulled over (before going off on the Jews), never reported in the press, was “My life is over. I’m fucked. Robyn’s going to leave me.” The couple’s daughter Hannah was getting married that September, and Robyn had reportedly given him an ultimatum, something like “Don’t do anything to embarrass us before this wedding. I don’t want you in trouble, otherwise it’s over.”

According to a friend who knows Gibson well, she had already left him. He had told her he was going to be on location in the jungle near Veracruz for two months, but he ended up being away for nine. It was a tough shoot under primitive conditions with many non-actors speaking Mayan with English inflections. Toward the end he reportedly fell off the wagon again. “Everybody knew that he hadn’t been drinking in a really long time, so there was gossip about it,” says Stacy Perskie, the second assistant director on the film. According to Adrian Grunberg, “There were crew dinners. People were saying, ‘I know that wasn’t water he was drinking, it was vodka.’ It came from a number of people, and there was no reason to doubt it.”

By Peter Biskind, Vanity Fair