Mel Gibson’s Malibu house was burning to the ground in the California wildfires while he was on Joe Rogan’s podcast predicting the end of civilization, the actor said Thursday.
“I was kind of ill at ease while [Rogan and I] were talking because I knew my neighborhood was on fire,” Gibson told NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas Reports in a phone interview. “I thought, ‘I wonder if my place is still there.’ But when I got home, sure enough, it wasn’t there.”
While Gibson was in Austin, Texas, on Thursday recording the podcast, devastating wildfires were sweeping the Los Angeles area. Seven people have been killed and more than 10,000 buildings destroyed as five large fires blaze across a 25-mile area north of downtown, the AP reported.
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As Gibson spoke on NewsNation, the network showed what remained of his home: a low stone wall, a pair of chimneys and their fireplaces, a few random metal framing supports, and a surprisingly insubstantial pile of burned bricks and other rubble.
He said he had never seen a place “so perfectly burnt,” describing the area as “completely toasted.”
“It’s kind of devastating. It’s emotional,” Gibson said, later adding: “I lived there about 14, 15 years, so it was home to me, and 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.”
He said he had flown to Austin right as the winds were picking up and joked that every time he leaves town, a fire breaks out. The last one got within a few hundred yards of his house, but this one left his place looking like the city of Dresden, Germany, after it was bombed during World War II, he added.
“But you know, hey, and 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,” he said.
Even the family chickens, which were locked up in a coop, miraculously survived.
On Thursday, Gibson had told Rogan he was waiting to find out whether his house had survived the “inferno” back home. Citing Jared Diamond’s 2011 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, he also observed that, “All those earmarks, the precursors of a collapse, they’re present in our time.”
During their conversation, Gibson followed Donald Trump in blaming California Governor Gavin Newsom for the wildfires. But speaking to NewsNation he declined to single anyone out for being responsible.
“Those winds were something else,” he said, referring to gale-force winds that drove the fires out of control. “The water wasn’t doing what it should have. The forests weren’t cleared like they should have been. So I don’t know. It’s the perfect fire storm.”
