I don't know that it exists, the perfect family. It's always complicated.
— Ben Mendelsohn
I'm very cagey by nature.
I don't believe in the transformation myth, where if you have more success, life changes for you.
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.
Before 'Animal Kingdom,' I wasn't particularly thought of in villainous roles.
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.
I've spent various periods of my career being thought of as various things, various degrees of substance and ideas.
Acting is a bit of a heart and soul exercise with me. It's kind of all I've got.
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.
Fifteen years old, out in the world, acting was all I had.
The thing about acting is you have to wait to be asked to the dance.
I think I've benefited from not being hugely known. It means I have to do something really effective to be noticed.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's very little different between the way the government operates in America and the way criminals do.
You can certainly extend your adolescence. There's people that are very good at extending it indefinitely.
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 that impress me are Bob Dylan. The ones who keep working, year in and year out, and keep coming up with stuff.
It would be excellent to do a 'Star Wars.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
