Ben Mendelsohn happy to be typecast as villain as career hits purple patch
IT’S easy to see why Hollywood has made the 49-year-old Australian its go-to villain — and it’s the sort of typecasting he can live with.
Confidential
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IT’S become known as The Full Mendo — a menacing scowl combined with a gravelly voice that merely hints at the possibility of violence.
That slight curl of the top lip and his sleepy eyes allow Ben Mendelsohn to make even the lyrics of a joyous song from Disney’s The Lion King sound like vicious underworld grab for power.
It has also allowed him to play some of the most memorable villains in modern film and TV, from his terrifying “Pope” Cody in the dark Aussie hit Animal Kingdom to the efficiently evil Director Orson Krennic in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
It’s easy to see why Hollywood has made the 49-year-old its go-to villain and it’s typecasting he can live with.
“You know what? It’s more fun to play the bad guy,” he told a British interviewer. “You get to behave in ways you might want to behave in normal life, but can’t. So I don’t mind being a specialist in bad.”
And with his latest role as the hateful Nolan Sorrento in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi thriller Ready Player One, Mendelsohn has sealed his place as the archetypal baddie.
The film, based on the 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, is set in 2045 and centres on the Oasis, a virtual world where apathetic citizens of the future escape to indulge their fantasy lives.
Hero of the story is 18-year-old Wade Watts, who is trying to find the ultimate gamer’s prize — ownership of Oasis. Enter Sorrento, an unscrupulous businessman intent on controlling Oasis for profit.
Mendelsohn doesn’t mince words when he describes his latest character.
“He’s a guy with wounded vanity who ended up finagling his way into becoming a master of the universe and wants everyone else to pay for it, basically,” Mendelsohn says, laughing.
“You know, just a dickhead. An ... idiot. Just some punk who’s trying to suck up to the guy who made the internet, got rebuffed, got angry and has manoeuvred his way up the chain inside this corporation and took it over.”
Mendelsohn came to the attention of Spielberg — who he says “basically raised me” and whose 1975 movie Jaws affected him so much he still cannot swim in the ocean — after seeing him in the award-winning Netflix drama Bloodline. In it, Mendelsohn plays one of the most hideous characters of his career in Danny Rayburn, the elder brother of a Florida crime family.
That Spielberg even knew who he was made Mendelsohn’s head spin. That the superstar director asked to meet with him for a possible part in his upcoming movie blew him away.
“I went and met with him and he laid it out,” Mendelsohn says.
“I mean he didn’t lay it out for me straight there, but it looked pretty good. And I said: ‘Look, you give me the job, you don’t give me the job, this is good enough for me. I got to sit in a room with you.’ It was all jam, mate.”
It took three months to hear back, about the role but Spielberg gave Mendelsohn the job.
Trading on the affection for 1980s nostalgia (think Netflix hit Stranger Things for a start), Spielberg has filled Ready Player One with pop culture references from movies such as The Shining, Back to the Future and even his own classic blockbuster Jurassic Park.
Author and script co-writer Ernest Cline has a theory on why the 1980s are so hot right now.
“When I was growing up, there were a lot of coming-of-age movies set in the ’50s and early ’60s like American Graffiti or Stand By Me,” the 45-year-old explains.
“The filmmakers of that time were telling stories they were nostalgic about from their own childhoods.
“(The 1980s) were a unique decade because of different aspects of technology. We were part of the first generation to have home computers and use a modem to dial out and connect with another computer — that was the beginning of the internet age.”
It’s the 1980s emerging love of computer games that Spielberg draws on for Ready Player One. Mendelsohn recalls a childhood playing early computer games, an interest that continues today.
“I’ve played video games for most of my life, although pinball was my first love in the ’70s,” he told British media. “I grew up right in the sweet spot for this. I had a TRS-80 and a Commodore 64, so I know the turf.
When asked if he will reveal the name of his online gaming profile, Mendelsohn teases.
“I may have a few names,” the star says cagily.
“Do you think I’m going to tell you them? Pleeease? I’m not having some bunch of little troll-y freaks coming up to me. I think that’s part of the joy of that world isn’t it? That you get to go in and be what you wanna be.”
If Mendelsohn is riding a huge wave of success in the US right now, it’s come after a lifetime working towards that success. He may only have come to Hollywood’s attention after his role in 2010’s Animal Kingdom and later on Bloodline, but the hardworking actor has been a regular on Aussie screens since he was in high school.
He landed the role of Ted Morgan alongside Kylie Minogue in the Henderson Kids while still in school. Less than two years later he scored a role on Neighbours and then his breakthrough role in 1987 classic The Year My Voice Broke.
But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. At one point Mendelsohn found himself washing dishes in a Bondi restaurant and later working in a Melbourne bakery. A quick look at his credits for the early 2000s reveals only a few one-off guest roles.
“I wasn’t working a lot,” he says of the dry spell, “but I had some pretty happy times not working a lot. I mean, if you have to not work a lot, Australia is pretty kind to you.
“There are worse places in the world you can be. Just getting older, you just know. You get a sense that life’s really good, smile, enjoy it.
“It’s more about that then the trajectory of life or anything. You get over enough stuff and you’re just happy that things are good.”
He credits Claudia Karvan for dragging him out of that slump when she wrote him into the award-winning drama Love My Way in 2004.
Later this year, however, his on-screen villainy will continue in what is one of the most classic bad guys when he plays the Sheriff of Nottingham in a remake of Robin Hood, backing it up with an as-yet unconfirmed part in Captain Marvel.
Mendelsohn has worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood — Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman and Christian Bale, to name a few — but the unassuming Aussie, who based himself in LA just five years ago, is still not accustomed to the bright lights.
“I am just not used to it,” he says. “It’s really weird and really nice, but I am just not used to it. I smile sometimes when I am driving around when I think about it.
“Someone was just asking why there are so many of us — why do we kick up so many Australians doing well over here?
“You can’t think like that too much where we come from — it’s a different vibe.”
Originally published as Ben Mendelsohn happy to be typecast as villain as career hits purple patch
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