Ben Mendelsohn is living the dream and hanging with Darth Vader in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
THE Star Wars galaxy has a new enemy played by Aussie actor Ben Mendelsohn. He wears a cape, rolls with Death Troopers and faces off with Darth Vader.
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WHENEVER Ben Mendelsohn was on the set of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story shooting his scenes as Empire baddie Orson Krennic, he wasn’t alone. Eight-year-old Ben — the kid who was hit “like a tonne of bricks” the day he saw the original Star Wars in a cinema on Melbourne’s Flinders Street back in 1977 — was with him every step of the way.
“The kid in the candy shop bit, you don’t want to push it aside,” says Mendelsohn, sitting in what is pretty much Star Wars HQ — the Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic campus in San Francisco.
“You just want to let the kid in the candy shop enjoy the play-acting with you, if you know what I mean? For me it was a hugely enjoyable thing to be able to look up and, like, there are Stormtroopers at work! Because I remember when no one gave a rat’s. I mean, I remember, there were yeeeeeears when no one gave a rat’s. So it was pretty nice.”
He stops.
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“Let me clarify that — about me. No one gave a rat’s about me. Let me not leave that one unclear.”
When George Lucas’s prequels were made in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with large chunks of Episodes II and III filmed at Fox Studios in Sydney, Mendelsohn had tried to get in on the action.
Unfortunately, this was mid-No One Gave a Rat’s.
“I went to meet on it; I think it was for the part that Joel (Edgerton) ended up doing, which was the uncle,” he says.
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It might have stung at the time (“C’est la vie; you’ve got to suck it up”), but Mendelsohn is now clear: Rogue One was worth waiting for.
“Turns out it was,” he nods. “There’s a lot of times I feel like I would have told myself: ‘Don’t worry about a bunch of stuff, mate, because one day you’ll be in Star Wars’.”
Mendelsohn isn’t just IN Star Wars — the entrance his Director Krennic makes in Rogue One is iconic: white cape billowing ominously in the wind and surrounded by his team of elite, black-clad enforcers known as Death Troopers.
(Director Gareth Edwards has pointed out that this is a deliberate inversion of the all-black Darth Vader surrounded by all-white stormtroopers.)
Hit likes to imagine that Mendelsohn requested the wind machine be turned up in this scene, to ensure optimum cape swirl.
“Oh darlin’,” he drawls, “there were no f***en wind machines! That was Iceland in full punish mode of horizontal rain. In fact, at one moment, the cape goes back the other direction ...” He mimes the cape flapping all over the place and obscuring his vision.
“That cape,” he adds, “that’s part of the genius of Star Wars.”
If the cape told him all he needed to know about Krennic’s posture and demeanour, the Death Troopers — a new inclusion into the Star Wars universe — were his ultimate accessory.
“Death Troopers, you’ve never even seen them before, but yeah, they roll with me,” Mendelsohn laughs. “Yeah, walking with those Death Troopers in Iceland, that’s one of the real peak memories of this thing.”
A spin-off from the core saga that follows a ragtag team of Rebels as they conspire to steal the plans for the Death Star, Rogue One slots into the timeline just before the very first Star Wars film, A New Hope.
It’s a war film, with initial reactions out of the Hollywood premiere calling it intense, relentless and packing some of the best action ever seen in the franchise.
Mendelsohn calls it “gutsy” and says its M classification in Australia is “well warranted”.
“It’s a lot more full-on than any of its predecessors. It is allowed to stand outside of the run of these movies, so consequently, it’s got a much harder edge and can go places where others can’t.”
This harder edge is the space where Mendelsohn excels.
From his international breakthrough in Animal Kingdom to The Dark Knight Rises, Killing Them Softly, Starred Up, The Place Beyond the Pines, Slow West and beyond, the 47-year-old has called on an unsettling/intimidating vibe at will and to devastating effect.
And it’s the skill that drew Gareth Edwards and producer Kathleen Kennedy his way when they needed someone to go toe to toe with Darth Vader.
Asked what murky depths he draws this from, Mendelsohn looks almost sheepish.
“Oh well, you know what it’s like,” he shrugs. “If you grew up in Australia you understand that there’s a good deal of non-verbal communication that goes on, particularly between the guys. My current best thinking is that’s part of why Australians do well over here, that we are used to communicating a lot less with words than some other people are.”
Though both on Team Empire, Krennic and the big bloke in black don’t get along.
Krennic, a working-class guy tasked with building the Death Star, doesn’t fit into the Empire’s Shakespearean-accented upper echelons. And while Vader prattles on about this mystic Force stuff, Krennic simply deploys sheer force.
“What we see is a guy that has to bring the Death Star online and he has to do it quickly and he also has to make sure everyone knows he’s the one who brought it online,” Mendelsohn explains.
To do this, Krennic rips scientist Galen Erso away from his idyllic life and forces him to work on the project. But in doing so, he stokes the Rebel fire within Erso’s daughter, Jyn (played by Felicity Jones), who grows to become the hero of this tale.
As marvellous a character as Krennic is, it’s already galaxy lore that Vader continues on in the Star Wars timeline while Krennic does not.
Or ... does he?
“I wouldn’t take that as written at all,” says Mendelsohn.
Are we assuming too much?
“No. One would be mad not to. But you’d expect me to dodge that one successfully,” he grins.
The kid in the candy shop is in full effect as Mendelsohn describes seeing Vader “appear through a mist” on set and the day Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, dropped by to visit.
“It’s a big deal to see Luke in the flesh,” he says. “He’s the heart and the soul of the entire thing. He’s pretty bloody good.”
He’ll float on this cloud nine straight into a couple of weeks of “semi-bludge” over Christmas. He’s then due in London in January to put the finishing touches on Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, a drama about Winston Churchill (played by a transformative Gary Oldman) in the early days of WWII.
Mendelsohn’s role in the film knocks the walls out of that blue-collar bad guy box of his, and he knows it.
He’s playing King George VI, father to our current Queen Elizabeth.
“King George gives me particular pleasure, particularly in light of certain Australians over the years ... It’s like, ‘OK, well, you really had me pegged, didn’t ya?’ People will tell you — inverted commas — ‘who you are’ a lot, if you’re doing this, and particularly at home, that’s one of our features. It’s nice to broaden that perception for them every now and then.”
That broadening is exactly what moving to the US in the wake of Animal Kingdom has allowed Mendelsohn to do. He’s been based in LA for the past couple of years with his English writer wife Emma Forrest and their baby daughter, and hasn’t been back to Australia since March, when Netflix flew him over to launch the streaming service and promote his Emmy-winning series Bloodline.
Now, he admits, homesickness has kicked in.
“I’ve started to miss it, baaadly,” he admits. “The people, the food, the coffee, the vibe, the air ... The sensibility.”
He’s not whingeing, he points out, he’s just been busy playing out his boyhood fantasies for real.
How on earth does our Mendo top this?
“I don’t need to top it,” he replies. “It doesn’t have to get topped. Look, I started off as the hare in the race and I had to learn how to be the tortoise. I had to learn how to just keep plodding, plodding, plodding along. If I can keep doing that, I’d be pretty happy.”
ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY OPENS TODAY
Originally published as Ben Mendelsohn is living the dream and hanging with Darth Vader in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
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