LOS ANGELES : After an eight-year absence from acting and a period of personal turmoil which left many in Hollywood wondering if he would ever work again, Mel Gibson is finally back.

The 54-year-old Oscar-winning actor-director — for years one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars — returns Friday in his first major role since 2002, headlining the action thriller “Edge of Darkness”.

Gibson’s re-emergence is the latest step on the road to rehabilitation which has followed his 2006 bust for drunken-driving and subsequent revelations of anti-Semitic remarks made to police during his arrest.

The low point of that spectacular public shaming was followed by tabloid speculation about the state of the actor’s marriage, culminating in confirmation last year that his wife of nearly 30 years had filed for divorce.

While Gibson continued to write during his de facto exile, the “Lethal Weapon” and “Braveheart” star admitted he had considered never returning to acting during his absence.

“Probably further towards the beginning but then as time went on I was like, ‘Eh, maybe I should I try that again’,” he told journalists at a Los Angeles press event ahead of the January 29 release of “Edge of Darkness.”

“You just don’t know and that’s why I didn’t make some big pronouncement like, ‘I’m quitting. I’m retiring.’ I didn’t want to do that. I just thought that I’d back away for a while.”

“I was just tired and bored with it. I’ve done that a couple of times. I’ve just walked away and spent a year not doing it and doing something else.

“I think it’s a natural thing. As soon as something starts getting a little tedious and you want to spice it up again you kind of have to change it up.”

Gibson’s last major role was in 2002′s “Signs”, M. Night Shyamalan’s supernatural thriller about a former priest who rediscovers his faith after an alien invasion of Earth.

Gibson said he had felt “stale” after completing the film and decided to focus instead on directing, writing and producing.

He received critical plaudits and stellar box office results with “The Passion of the Christ” in 2004 but struggled to emulate that success with 2006′s “Apocalypto”, an action movie about the ancient Mayans which was released only a few months after his alcohol-fueled arrest.

Yet Gibson says he was bitten by the “acting bug” around about the same time that he received the screenplay for “Edge of Darkness”, which had been adapted from the 1985 British television series of the same name.

The film stars Gibson as a detective investigating the murder of his daughter, unraveling conspiracies and political intrigue along the way.

“I thought all of a sudden that maybe after all these years that I might have something to offer again, and it coincided with a very good piece of material,” Gibson explained.

“This was a compelling story with good elements attached. If it wasn’t this, it would’ve been something else but this was the best thing that I saw.”

Gibson said his preparations for the physically demanding role in “Edge of Darkness” took into account his ageing frame.

“I ordered a chiropractor for the day after, because I knew how I was going to feel,” he said of filming fight sequences. “I knew that I was going to wake up feeling like roadkill and I did.

“You don’t bounce back as quick as you used to. It’s not a pleasant experience. You don’t pop back the way that you used to but that’s okay so long as it still looks good.”

Whether or not audiences will be willing to embrace Gibson again remains to be seen. “I would hope people would be gracious and give me a chance,” Gibson told the Los Angeles Times in a recent interview.

Gibson is already working on his next directing project, a historical epic about the reign of Vikings, realizing what has been a childhood dream.

“The very first idea that I ever had about making a film, my first thought ever about being a filmmaker was when I was 16-years-old, and I wanted to make a Viking movie,” Gibson said.

Gibson, who shot “The Passion of the Christ” in Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew before using Mayan dialect for “Apocalypto”, said his untitled Viking project would probably be made in English and Old Norse.

“I think it’s going to be in English, an English that would’ve been spoken back then and Old Norse,” Gibson said. “I’m going to give it to you real, man.

“I want a Viking to scare you. I don’t want a Viking to say, in a heavy Brooklyn accent, ‘I’m going to die with this sword in my hand.’ I don’t want to hear that. It just pulls the rug out from under you.

“I want to see somebody who I’ve never seen before speaking low, guttural German who scares the living shit out of you, coming up to my house. What is that like? What would that have been like?”