Braveheart was a wee bit of invention: Mel Gibson
Mel Gibson conceded the epic Braveheart massaged history to deliver the character of William Wallace.
Speaking 14 years after the movie’s release, director Gibson said: “Wallace was a monster. He always smelt of smoke; he was always burning people’s villages down. He was like what the Vikings called ‘a berserker’.”
Gibson, who famously donned tartan for Braveheart, continued: “He wasn’t as nice as the character we saw up there on the screen. We romanticised him a bit. We shifted the balance because someone’s got to be the good guy against the bad guy; that’s the way stories are told.”
The admission sent some Scottish historians into a wee lather, as they claim Wallace was neither the all-time bad guy nor the Hollywood good guy.
While the movie presented him as a poor villager, he was actually a landowner and minor knight who made important diplomatic missions.
Fiona Watson, a Wallace biographer and academic said: “Mel Gibson’s [now] giving us the other version of the myth, the knuckles dragging across the floor one, which is equally untrue. The real man surely lies in between. After all, Wallace went to the Continent on diplomatic missions after the debacle at Falkirk [the 1298 battle], which Wallace lost. I don’t know of many berserkers who did that.”
Leave a Reply