Ben Mendelsohn
Ben Mendelsohn
Paul Benjamin "Ben" Mendelsohnis an Australian actor, who first rose to prominence for his role in the Australian film The Year My Voice Brokeand continued to have major roles in Australian films such as The Big Steal, Metal Skin, Cosi, Mulletand Australia...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth3 April 1969
CountryAustralia
school thinking giving
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.
thinking ideas acting
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.
moving people long
As soon as you start acting in an accent, you're sort of out of your comfort zone. Maybe people start getting used to accents after a long period of time. But as soon as you do that, it's not so much as capturing the sound of the way other people speak, it's being able to actually be and move around in the sound.
teaching catholic stuff
I'm very interested in the history of Christianity, and what I can say for sure is that the Catholics and the Jesuits and stuff were very big on teaching and on learning.
who-i-am people ends
People don't know who I am, and that's not a bad thing at all from my end.
views get-better fantastic
From my point of view, things don't have to change to get better. Things are fantastic.
heart exercise soul
Acting is a bit of a heart and soul exercise with me. It's kind of all I've got.
careers ideas substance
I've spent various periods of my career being thought of as various things, various degrees of substance and ideas.
parent acting able
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.
bullshit creative stuff
There were the usual types of things that happen, in a production, like logistical bullshit, and this and that and the other. That's the sort of stuff that happened. But I never felt, in a creative sense, that we were ever veering into a place that I hadn't signed on for.
mean home childhood
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.
running couple boys
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.
two tangible doe
There are two things: 1) what things one does in the world, and 2) what family one has. There's the two really tangible things that can stay.