Oscar-winning actor and director Mel Gibson has played down the loss of his $14.5 million Malibu home to raging wildfires, insisting in the end, it’s all just “stuff.”
“I’m looking at video of ruins of what was once your home. How are you doing?” asked NewsNation journalist Elizabeth Vargas, who interviewed Gibson by phone.
“I’m doing good, you know, it’s just a thing,” the Christian actor replied. “But it is obviously kind of devastating emotionally. You know, you’ve lived there for a long time. And you had all your ‘stuff’… Do you remember George Carlin talking about your ‘stuff’?”
“I had all my ‘stuff’ there and it’s like I’ve been relieved from the burden of my stuff, because it’s all in cinders,” he added.
Gibson was referring to a famous skit by comedian George Carlin, in which he asserted that “a house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.”
“You can see that when you’re taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see everybody’s got a little pile of stuff. All the little piles of stuff,” Carlin said.
“That’s what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get… more stuff!” he said.
“Well, at least I haven’t got any of those pesky plumbing problems anymore,” Gibson quipped during his interview.
“I have never seen a place so perfectly burnt. You could put it in an urn, you know?” he said.
“Some of the neighbors really got it hard,” Gibson said. “You know, Ed Harris, the actor, lives down the street and I think his place is gone and many of my friends up and down the street. And it was kind of random. It wasn’t every place but it was quite a few places.”
“There were a dozen places or so that were just non-existent, I mean, nothing but a chimney and a few roof tiles and you dare not walk around for the nails,” he told Vargas.
“It was completely toasted. It’s like somebody did it on purpose,” he said. “It was the perfect firestorm, I mean, my place looked like Dresden.”
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“It’s emotional. I lived there for about 14, 15 years so it was home to me,” reflected the Braveheart star.
“I had a lot of personal things there that, you know, I can’t get back … All kinds of stuff, everything from photographs to files… to just personal things that I had from over the years, clothes… pretty cool stuff, you know, but you know, hey, that can all be replaced. These are only things,” he noted.
“The good news is that those in my family and those that I love are all well and we’re all healthy and happy and out of harm’s way. That’s all I care about really,” he said.
