Ben Mendelsohn
I don't have memorabilia but try to take a bit of wardrobe, usually because they dress me better than I dress myself.
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.
'Animal Kingdom' is a lot of things, but it's not heartwarming.
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.
For mine, the villains of the piece were always important. In a traditional sense, that's always an important role.
If you're going to be a father and whatnot, yeah, you better be responsible about it as best you can.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
'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 came from the outer suburbs of Melbourne, so you do learn how to survive in that environment.
I generally feel like people that are doing the wardrobe know more about wardrobe than I do, and they have an overview.
I like to call up ghosts of things past for myself when I'm working a lot.
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.
Typically, I'll wake up at 4:30 in the morning. It's just the continual jet lag residue, just weird sleeping hours.
$3,000 from a residual cheque was all I made one year.
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.
If you're a 'character actor,' you get hired to play baddies a lot.
My general feeling about approach to work is that anyone that's there, they're all there to do the best job they can.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
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 actor who has spent twenty years trying to crack America, the day I reached the 'Bloodline' set and found my name on a chair next to Sissy Spacek's was the happiest of my working life.
There are always dimensions, and the way they get expressed is through the writing and the actors and the director you get to work with on that day. But there are always dimensions, outside of really basic stuff for very young people where it needs to be very clear.
Crewing and being on film sets is kind of like being in the carnival, with carnie folks.Collection: Kind
If you ride like lightning, you're gonna crash like thunder.Collection: Lightning
Life is a lot sweeter, I think, than you can be aware of it at times.Collection: Thinking
People don't know who I am, and that's not a bad thing at all from my end.Collection: Who I Am
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.Collection: Two
I think that story wins out over acting and that the thing as a whole is more important than the performances therein.Collection: Winning
From my point of view, things don't have to change to get better. Things are fantastic.Collection: Views
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.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: Bullshit
Acting is broad enough a church that you can pick your races, decide which way you want to go at different times.I think that the story and circumstance tends to dictate the most and then what you do with your own approach after that.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Moving