14 DAY TRIAL // In the aftermath of the “Mel Gibson was axed from The Hangover 2” scandal, director Todd Phillips is still trying to piece together what happened to get so many fans riled up – and speaking about it.
For starters, Phillips stresses in a recent interview cited by E! Online, no one was fired from the film, let alone Mel Gibson. To be fired, he first had to be “hired,” which he wasn’t.
“No one was ever fired. It’s a term that is so obscene to me,” Phillips says, adding that Gibson was simply doing him a favor by doing the cameo.
“Someone was doing me a favor to come in for a two-minute cameo, and we changed it. It wasn’t like we fired somebody. [Gibson] was just doing a favor from the beginning,” the director says.
As it happens, Gibson won’t be doing Phillips a favor anymore, since his cameo has been changed: Liam Neeson is now attached to “The Hangover 2” for a brief appearance as a tattoo artist.
E! also notes that, while he’s adamant no one fired Gibson from the film, Phillips won’t say what lead to the decision or, more importantly, who had a say in it.
“The filmmaker wouldn’t give an inch when asked who (i.e., Was it Zach Galifianakis?) on the Hangover team objected to Gibson scoring a snippet of screen time as a Bangkok tattoo artist,” E! writes.
As we also reported a while back, shortly after official confirmation of Gibson’s involvement was made, Galifianakis was complaining in an interview about how much he hated having no say in certain casting matters.
“But a movie you’re acting in, you don’t have a lot of control – you just show up and vomit your lines out. I’m not the boss,” the actor said at the time, refusing to name any names.
“I’m in a deep protest right now with a movie I’m working on, up in arms about something. But I can’t get the guys to [listen]... I’m not making any leeway,” he added.
All he would say was that he was upset about a film he was then working on, which left little doubt as to which he was referring: “The Hangover 2.”
“It has something to do with a movie I’m working on, yeah. I’ll tell you about it later. It’s very frustrating,” he added.