(Credits: Saban Films)
In 2010, an embattled Mel Gibson attempted to make a Hollywood comeback four years after he derailed his career with some infamous comments made while being arrested for drink-driving. At that point, he hadn’t been a leading man since 2002’s Signs, and a lot was riding on the film. The deck was stacked in his favour, though, when Casino Royale director Martin Campbell signed up to direct, and Robert De Niro came on board as his co-star. Then everything went to hell only a week into the shoot when De Niro abruptly left – and the rumour mill went into overdrive.
The story of Gibson’s attempted comeback goes back to 1985. Back then, he was an actor well on his way to Hollywood superstardom, with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome releasing that very year. During his downtime, though, he watched the BBC miniseries entitled Edge of Darkness and was captivated by the sinister crime drama/political conspiracy thriller.
“I watched the original miniseries in the ’80s,” Gibson told Female.au in 2010, “and I really liked it. It was one of those things that I would stop and watch. I didn’t do that with many things, but I watched that, because I found it really, fascinating.”
The show was a revelation at the time because of its craft and the seriousness with which it approached its incendiary subject matter. It touched on elements of government cover-ups and nuclear espionage during a particularly dark time for the UK under Thatcherism, but it did so in a labyrinthine, tautly plotted manner.
The miniseries was directed by New Zealander Martin Campbell, who would go on to ply his trade in America with movies like GoldenEye, The Mask of Zorro, and Green Lantern. As his profile in Hollywood increased, though, Campbell had the urge to go back to the world of widowed policeman Ronald Craven, unravelling a conspiracy while trying to find the culprit behind his daughter’s murder. He eventually set up a remake that would transpose events to Boston, streamline the story, and replace the late Bob Peck with Gibson.
One of Edge of Darkness’ most important roles, though, is that of the mysterious rogue CIA operative Darius Jedburgh. In the miniseries, he was played by Cape Fear’s Joe Don Baker, and Campbell ironically cast someone else from that 1991 Martin Scorsese remake in his new version of the story: Robert De Niro. Filming began in August 2008 – but only a week later, De Niro was on a plane home.
“Sometimes things don’t work out,” a spokesperson for De Niro told Variety on September 4th. “It’s called creative differences.”
Nothing else was ever publicly said about why De Niro left the production so quickly, but that didn’t stop rumours from spreading that he had fallen out with Gibson. In this scenario, it was alleged that De Niro took umbrage with Gibson’s antisemitic comments in 2006, which hit particularly close to home because his mother is Jewish. This doesn’t hold much water, though, because it’s been proven that De Niro’s mum was Presbyterian.
Did De Niro really leave the movie because of Gibson’s unsavoury beliefs? Did they fall out for another reason? Or, is this a case of the simplest answer being the correct one, and De Niro really did have creative differences with Campbell? It doesn’t seem like we’ll ever know because neither De Niro, Gibson, nor Campbell has ever spilt the beans on what really happened.
All that is known for sure is that the 2010 movie version of Edge of Darkness, which substituted a gruff Ray Winstone for De Niro, wasn’t a patch on the original miniseries, which is still held up as a hallowed text to this day. Even Campbell later admitted he didn’t quite hit the target the second time around, telling Radio Times in 2019, “You can’t do what you did for six hours in 120 minutes. There’s none of the political spine to the story, the intrigue, all of that labyrinthine stuff, so you’re really reduced to ‘Daughter killed; who did it?’”
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