Ben Mendelsohn on his deep love for Australia and why he was getting tired of being the villain
Ben Mendelsohn has become Hollywood’s go-to villain but he says he’s relieved he gets to show a different side and reveals why he couldn’t have succeeded anywhere else but Australia.
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Ben Mendelsohn didn’t realise it at the time but he was getting a little tired of playing the bad guy.
His breakout international role as a heartless thug in the hit 2010 Aussie drama Animal Kingdom paved the way for a run of shady parts in The Dark Knight Rises, Bloodline, Star Wars: Rogue One, Ready Player One and Robin Hood, and turned him into Hollywood’s go-to villain of the last decade. And while he relished the roles and the turbocharge those blockbusters gave what had been a somewhat stalled career, he knew he had much more to offer if given the chance.
“It mainly played on my mind around about the time when I would do interviews or I would become self-aware of it,” Mendelsohn says over the phone from his adopted Los Angeles home, where he’s been bunkered down during the current coronavirus crisis. “On one hand, what I used to say about it is absolutely true – it is an honour to play the bad guy. But I knew it wasn’t the only trick I had up my sleeve.”
So when The Outsider, the adaptation of the Stephen King novel he produced and starred in as a flawed but fundamentally decent cop facing a malevolent force, was picked up by streaming giant HBO and went on to become a commercial and critical success, he breathed a huge sigh of relief.
“I guess I thought at that point ‘OK, cool, I’m a lifer – I will be able to work here, in England or at home until I drop’,” he says. “But it was reassuring in America because I understood how valuable it is to be framed in a different light.
“I knew it was important and it is a relief. I can actually feel it in my body as I talk.”
Mendelsohn further got the chance to flex his dramatic muscles in the Australian black comedy Babyteeth, the first movie he has made here since Animal Kingdom. His long time Australian agent had been “kicking me in the shins” to look at the part of a disconnected, suburban Sydney father of a teenager stricken with cancer, who falls in love with a drug addict, and he had just two words for her once he finally read the script: “it’s beautiful”.
“She has known me a long time and she said ‘I have never heard you say that about anything, ever. I have never heard you say those two words like that’. It was just a have-to-do kind of number.”
Although Babyteeth was filmed early last year, with Essie Davis playing his wife and rising star Eliza Scanlen (Little Women) as his daughter, Mendelsohn says the bittersweet story of love, life and loss is the perfect film for this moment in time and it will particularly resonate with Australians and New Zealanders and our particular approach to the word.
“It will leave you with a complex, life-affirming sadness and in this time, it’s kismet or something,” he says. “It’s weird that it’s come out right now. This is a strange time and it’s a time for a life-affirming sadness. It has our virtues on display, which are tolerance, mucking through and not necessarily knowing what to do all the time, but making the best of it. These are what I think of as the great Australian virtues.”
Although he has called Los Angeles home for most of the past decade, Mendelsohn has an enduring and deep love for his homeland, and has especially missed it while the COVID-19 pandemic has swept the world. Although he wasn’t specifically looking to do a film in Australia when Babyteeth came knocking – “I would have done it in Slovakia in Slovak” – he also thought it important to embrace his roots.
“I do miss a lot of things about home,” he says. “The food – and just the bulls--- people talk. I miss the feel of the sky and the light there, the water. It’s a really beautiful country.
“There had been a lot of blockbusters and I didn’t want to get away from what got me here. I didn’t want to get away from Australia. I didn’t want to get away from smaller, potentially more impacting films that could afford to just go where they wanted to go and didn’t have the same considerations.”
He says the experience of coming from a huge Star Wars or Marvel set to a smaller Australian movie is “like going from a fancy pants restaurant in the city to an outback pub”.
“The attitude is different,” he says. “You can still get fed there, you can still get your beer there, you can still do whatever you need to do, but you’d better be able to do it sitting on a box in the 40 degree heat while they do whatever they do.”
While Mendelsohn says he feels whatever debts he might have owed to the film industry that gave him his start in movies such as The Year My Voice Broke, The Big Steal and Spotswood, have been paid in full, he’s grateful for the skills he learned on TV and film sets here. He’s also pretty sure he couldn’t have succeed as a younger actor anywhere else, and certainly not in America. After his initial successes in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Mendelsohn developed a reputation as something of a wild child, to the point that his self-admitted “excessive hedonism” had left him mostly without acting work around the turn of the millennium. His international success coming later in life turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
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“I couldn’t have thrived anywhere else other than Australia,” he admits. “They’d have gotten jack of me.”
Why?
“Well, let’s not get explicit,” he hedges. “But it’s the virtues of Australia. It’s the wry toleration and patience and it’s kind of like ‘well, there’s not that many others of you and you can do the job – so come on then’. It’s a kind country in its way.
“If you step back up it’s a country with a lot of tolerance for human foibles. It has a gentler eye on that than a lot of other places, and certainly than here. They’d have eaten me up and spat me out 46 times already but I arrived here as an old bastard, thick-skinned.”
Babyteeth opens in cinemas nationally on Thursday.
The Outsider is now streaming on Foxtel on Demand.