The actress has narrated the unpleasant encounter that she had years ago with the controversial actor, who has already attacked this version of the story, calling Ryder a "liar".
After returning to the spotlight and the success achieved with her participation in 'Stranger Things', Winona Ryder seems to have taken a liking to television fiction and in mid-March she released another juicy project for the small screen, this time from HBO: ' The conspiracy against America'. The miniseries, based on Philip Roth's novel of the same name, presents an alternative past in which a Jewish family from New Jersey suffers the rise to power, during World War II, of a president who will end up revealing his sympathies with the Nazi ideology and will end up implanting fascism in the United States.
Ryder, who is Jewish (despite the fact that she acknowledges not being a religious person) heads the cast of the production and has resumed promoting it in the media these days. Thus, in an interview with The Sunday Times, the interpreter was asked about her own experiences of anti-Semitism in Hollywood. And it was not one or two, but a whole handful that Ryder remembered, who did not even hesitate to give a proper name: Mel Gibson. The filmmaker and actor has been involved in various controversies over time due to his discriminatory statements, and the story told by the 'Dracula' actress adds to this history.
The meeting between the two occurred at a party in 1995. According to Ryder, in the middle of the evening, when she was in the company of Gibson, a conversation centered on Jews arose. It was then that the director and star of 'Braveheart' questioned her, directly, the following: "You're not an 'oven avoider', are you?"
Her comment, which made reference to one of the fundamental methods of extermination of the bodies of Jews in concentration camps, was not, however, the only one in bad taste that Gibson made that night. And it is that the artist also made a completely unfortunate and homophobic joke. Gibson was smoking a cigarette with Ryder and a friend of this homosexual, and at one point he addressed the latter and according to the interpreter, he blurted out the following: "Wait, am I going to get AIDS?"
Mel Gibson flatly denies Ryder's story
Ryder assured during her interview with The Sunday Times that Gibson had apologized to her years later. However, his version of events is far from coinciding with that of the actor, who yesterday assured, through a statement published on TooFab, that Ryder's statements were "100% false."
"He lied about it a decade ago, when he spoke to the press, and he is lying about it now," Gibson's note read, in which he also accused Ryder of misrepresenting the attempt to fix things between the two after the event, making up the fact that he called her to ask for her forgiveness. According to Gibson, what he wanted then was to confront the actress because of her lies, but she refused to talk to him.
