Mel Gibson has revealed that his house burnt down while he was recording a controversial podcast interview with Joe Rogan.
The Braveheart actor-director said that he was “kind of ill at ease” while talking to Rogan because he knew his neighbourhood of Malibu “was on fire” due to the devastating blazes raging through the Los Angeles area.
“I thought ‘I wonder if my place is still there’, but when I got home, sure enough, it wasn’t there,” he told NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas Reports.
“I’ve never seen such a complete burn. It is obviously devastating, it’s emotional. You live there for a long time, and you had all your stuff. I lived there for about 14, 15 years so it was home to me.
Gibson continued: “I had a lot of personal things there that I can’t get back – everything from photographs to files to just personal things that I had from over the years. That can all be replaced. These are only things. And the good news is that those in my family and those I love are all well, and we’re all happy and healthy and out of harm’s way.”
At least seven people have been killed and countless others injured as fast-moving wildfires continue to tear across the outskirts of Los Angeles, leaving thousands of firefighters battling desperately to extinguish the blaze.
During his appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Gibson criticised California governor Gavin Newsom, claiming he “didn’t do anything” to combat Los Angeles’s environmental problems.
Follow The Independent’s live coverage on the wildfires, here
However, Gibson’s interview with Rogan proved controversial after he praised Robert F Kennedy Jr as well as Ivermectin, a drug that global authorities have warned against.
His praise for Kennedy arrives after more than 15,000 doctors signed a letter imploring the US Senate to reject his confirmation for secretary of health and human services.
The letter, organised by the advocacy group Committee to Protect Health Care, calls president-elect Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Kennedy “a slap in the face to every health care professional who has spent their lives working to protect patients from preventable illness and death”.
Elsewhere, a clip that has since gone viral, shows Gibson questioning Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, stating: “I don’t really go for it.”
The Passion of the Christ filmmaker continued: “Ice age, dinosaurs – what did they turn into? Things became extinct at some point. I don’t think I was some kind of legless thing that crawled out of the ocean. I don’t think I came from that. I think I was created.”
