At present Mel Gibson has his hopper filled with projects on all ends of the spectrum- Get The Gringo is set for VOD, while his Judah Maccabee project is one of WB’s major biblical epics on the slate, and now, apparently, he’s continuing to stoke the embers of his though-to-be-defunct Viking project Berserker.

Speaking at a Mad Max event in LA, the actor/director gave some updates about his various projects including Berserker, the aforementioned viking joint.

“…got a couple of things on the boil, a couple of projects that I’m writing. I just got a second draft of something I’m really excited about today– it’s actually a Viking thing. Vikings, as you know, are very unsympathetic characters and these guys will be bad. I sort of hooked up again with Randall Wallace, who did the script on Braveheart. Yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s called Berserker.”

Randall Wallace is indeed the screenwriter of Braveheart, as well as a string of epics after like Pearl Harbor, We Were Soldiers, and The Man In The Iron Mask. This is all before he pretty much went dormant in the early 2000s. Lets hope he’s still got those ancient combat chops.

There’s absolutely no timetable as Leo Dicaprio has long departed (ha!) the project and the Judah Maccabee epic is Gibson’s next priority, but you can rest easy knowing that Gibson hasn’t lost his fire for exceptionally violent films shot in archaic languages. As Gibson said, “I want to make something real and visceral,” which is code I’m sure you can decipher.

He also made some comments about the Maccabee film, comparing it to a Western.

“It’s heroic beyond belief. The entire might of the Seleucid Empire, which was Persia, their whole objective at the time was to wipe Judea off the map and they almost did it except for this little hold out that miraculously grew and wanted it all back again.”

…and then made some seemingly over-cavalier comments about how cool Tom Hardy is and how little of a shit he could give about him taking on his old franchise. Hit the Indiewire link to read the rest.

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Source | Indiewire (via Collider)