Mel Gibson has been axed from the Netflix Chicken Run sequel, after the actor who played Rocky in the 2000 original was accused of making an anti-Semitic remark to Winona Ryder.

The 64-year-old Mad Max star won’t be reprising his role, reports TheWrap on Tuesday.

Winona claimed that fellow actor Mel asked her if she was a Jewish “oven dodger” at a 1995 party.

The 48-year-old actress talked about the incident in an interview with the Sunday Times and reported by the NY Post.

The Stranger Things star recalled:

We were at a crowded party with one of my good friends, and Mel Gibson was smoking a cigar.

According to the actress, the topic of the Jewish faith came up and Winona claims that Mel asked her:

You’re not an oven dodger, are you?

The term “oven dodger” is an apparent reference to the way Jewish prisoners were incinerated in Nazi death camps.

But this wasn’t the only inappropriate comment Mel, 64, allegedly made throughout the night as the Beetlejuice actress claimed he then asked her friend, who is gay:

‘Oh, wait, am I gonna get AIDS?’

Winona – whose real name is Winona Laura Horowitz – also claimed that he later tried to apologize for his offensive behavior.

A representative for the actor called the allegations “100% untrue.”

The rep told The Sun exclusively that Mel reached out to Winona when the allegations were first reported in 2010 and

she refused to address them with him.

This isn’t the first time that the Passion of the Christ director has been accused of making anti-Semitic remarks.

Back in 2006, when he was stopped for a DUI in California, he reportedly told police officers:

Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.

However, he later told Variety that he doesn’t discriminate against anyone, rather, he only had a “nervous breakdown” which caused him to say that.

His own father, the late author Hutton Red Gibson, once gave an interview in which he said the Holocaust was “fiction.”

Gibson played Rocky, a plucky clucker who helped his fine-feathered friends fly the coop before it could be turned into a chicken pot pie factory, in the original movie – which became the highest-grossing stop-motion-animation film of all time when it came out, and secured BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations.

It’s unclear if the rest of the original cast, which includes Julia Sawalha, Phil Daniels, Imelda Staunton and Timothy Spall, will be returning to the 20-years-in-the-making sequel.

Justin Nwosu

Justin Nwosu is the founder and publisher of Flavision. His core interest is in writing unbiased news about Nigeria in particular and Africa in general. He’s a strong adherent of investigative journalism, with a bent on exposing corruption, abuse of power and societal ills.