Top 90 Quotes & Sayings by Ben Mendelsohn
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
I was with my grandmother, while one of my brothers lived with my dad, and one lived with my mom. It wasn't a great situation. Acting was the one good thing I was involved in.
It's got a lot more room for nuance and an assumption that people have started from the beginning. 'Bloodline' ends up being like a really good novel.
Acting is a bit of a heart and soul exercise with me. It's kind of all I've got.
The people that impress me are Bob Dylan. The ones who keep working, year in and year out, and keep coming up with stuff.
Once upon a time, they thought I was a sweet, wide-eyed boy that was just trying to figure out how to kiss the girl. Lots of comic relief and adolescent yearnings.
You think of 'Outlaw Josey Wales,' you immediately think of the old Indian guy, Sondra Locke, the old lady with the glasses, beautiful old actress.
I'm very cagey by nature.
At 15 I had moved out of my parents' place, and my options were looking pretty narrow. But I had this acting thing and I just wanted to be able to keep going because it was really good. That was all I wanted.
If you've been working since you were a teenager and working at a reasonably decent level, then you don't expect that you're going to be firmly in your 40s and start moving up in the world, if you like.
When you're a young boy, you're looking at older men for role modelling. Before I loved De Niro, I loved Clint Eastwood; I loved John Wayne. And James Bond.
I don't have memorabilia but try to take a bit of wardrobe, usually because they dress me better than I dress myself.
I think there's a lot of mythos about what's required in acting. The way that actors talk about acting is generally quite punishing, and I think actors want to put forward the idea that they do all of this work because, you know, it's a post-De Niro world, when, largely, in fact, it's almost never true.
For mine, the villains of the piece were always important. In a traditional sense, that's always an important role.
At any period of an actor's life, it's fairly likely that they'll be cast in ways that are reminiscent. That's the way it goes.
'Animal Kingdom' is a significant comet, and it's cast a tail. It's very hard to see anything post that happening without that.
I never felt like someone who was boyish and coming to terms with asking girls out or anything like that, which was what 'The Big Steal' and 'Spotswood' were about. But I guess that's the impression I left on people.
If you're going to be a father and whatnot, yeah, you better be responsible about it as best you can.
I wanted to keep working because work was essentially fantastic - you got to be around people, you got to be in a family, and that family changed from job to job. It was like being in the circus.
I'm very well known in the industry and relatively well known by people who are aficionados and what not, but outside of that - no.
One of the things that I found very confronting in my early working life was that people thought I was some sensitive doe-eyed lovelorn boy, because they'd seen me do that a couple of times. What tends to happen is you get a run of similar roles.
Fifteen years old, out in the world, acting was all I had.
Most young actors, that's all they're trying to do: Get better at acting and be able to keep doing it. And that doesn't work out for most people.
As an outsider in America, you do see the kind of hypocrisy that's rampant there.
I mean, there's a sense wherein you skip a part of childhood, too, when you start working at that age I did; I was out working and out of home at 15, paying my own way in the world.
There's very little different between the way the government operates in America and the way criminals do.
I did 'Quigley Down Under,' which is quite deliberately placed in Australia, which is a Tom Selleck, Alan Rickman, Laura San Giacomo film from '88, I want to say.
I don't know that it exists, the perfect family. It's always complicated.
I remember 'The Yearling' was the first film I ever saw, and my mom told me I cried for about four or five days afterwards. I'd be going along during the day and suddenly start crying over what had happened to the little deer.
I basically sat around unemployed in Sydney for three years straight, and the two things that saved me were the rugby league and my dog.
'Animal Kingdom' was an amalgam of two people that I had met-slash-known, not particularly well. They were both very, very scary people for very different reasons.
In a very real sense, all you do when you're shooting film or television is you shoot a scene, and then you shoot another scene, and then you shoot another scene.
The thing about home is that it's a tough place to sustain a career, just by dent of the size of the place. I had about as good a run there as anybody, but it's still a tough ask. I mean, the person I think with the best career in Australia is Ray Meagher, in 'Home and Away.'
I got a good-enough adolescence. I mean, there's a sense wherein you skip a part of childhood, too, when you start working at that age I did; I was out working and out of home at 15, paying my own way in the world.
I think I've benefited from not being hugely known. It means I have to do something really effective to be noticed.
It's a tougher gig than what people think it is. The proper, real, genuine, worldwide movie stars don't get a lot of downtime from the world outside. That's a tougher price, I think, than what people's fantasy of fame account for.
Accents are always difficult in their way, but as long as you're not throwing an audience off with it, then that's all it should be.
'Star Wars' is populated by so many great types; who wouldn't want to be a Han Solo kind of dude?
I got the first job and kept going. Once I got a job, I very much wanted to keep getting jobs, basically. I did try to learn what I could in those first couple of decades.
I generally feel like people that are doing the wardrobe know more about wardrobe than I do, and they have an overview.
'Animal Kingdom' is a lot of things, but it's not heartwarming.
If you're a 'character actor,' you get hired to play baddies a lot.
You feel an affinity with younger actors, because, you know, it's a very insecure job. And it can be a long time before you feel like, you know, things might be all right.
My general feeling about approach to work is that anyone that's there, they're all there to do the best job they can.
My favorite-ever version of 'King Lear' is the 1971 film by Peter Brooks. He has this enormous fur thing, and it adds enormous gravitas.
You can certainly extend your adolescence. There's people that are very good at extending it indefinitely.
I think now there's much more of a confessional culture. That's not my bag. I come from a slightly older school of thought: 'give 'em nothin.' You don't plead guilty.
I don't believe in the transformation myth, where if you have more success, life changes for you.
I suspect, for a lot of people who become actors, there's a feeling of wanting to be someone other than who they actually are.
I like to call up ghosts of things past for myself when I'm working a lot.
I've spent various periods of my career being thought of as various things, various degrees of substance and ideas.
The first 'Star Wars' film was enormously important. I grew up right smack-bang in the sweet spot of all of those. It's true cinema magic. It's fair to say that, as a kid, I would have been very happy to be Han Solo, and I would have been happy to have gone out with Princess Leia.
I had a pretty good career at home. What keeps you going is not having a plan B. It's a very good thing. I think if I had a viable plan B, I might not have kept going.
The thing about acting is you have to wait to be asked to the dance.
It would be excellent to do a 'Star Wars.'
Typically, I'll wake up at 4:30 in the morning. It's just the continual jet lag residue, just weird sleeping hours.
The very rough story is this: Melbourne boy, out of both my parents' houses at a young age, lived with my grandmother, drama teacher twisted me into doing this TV thing that I thought my mates were doing, too.
The people I've encountered who are really dangerous in my life don't go around with their fangs drawn - they are dangerous because of the way they interpret what's going on.
$3,000 from a residual cheque was all I made one year.
Before 'Animal Kingdom,' I wasn't particularly thought of in villainous roles.
I came from the outer suburbs of Melbourne, so you do learn how to survive in that environment.
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