Ben Mendelsohn talks Robin Hood and Captain Marvel

He’s carved out a lucrative niche as Hollywood’s villain of choice. As Melbourne’s Ben Mendelsohn approaches the big 5-0, he reflects on his “extraordinary” career renaissance.

Melbourne actor Ben Mendelsohn is heading for a big birthday next year — he’ll hit the dreaded 5-0 in April.

But unlike previous milestones — turning 30 and 40 were “a big deal” — the Aussie A-lister says he won’t be doing too much soul-searching about it.

“The 5-0 is a big one,” he concedes over the phone from his adopted home of Los Angeles. “But I don’t know if something happens in your 40s where you are like ‘whatever’. You know it’s coming, you know it’s a big one but I think by the time you’re in the later part of your 40s … you have done most of the head miles or reflecting about it before it happens. I feel like I have already done a bunch of that anyway. But yeah, it’s a big birthday.”

HOW BEN BECAME HOLLYWOOD’S NO. 1 VILLAIN

BEN’S LIFE ON THE DARK SIDE

BEN PROMISES TO GO FULL MENDO

Unsurprisingly, any reflecting he has done about his career over the last decade has only brought him smiles. Ten years ago he was just starting to come out of a career slump that at one point had him washing dishes at a restaurant in Sydney’s Bondi and working at a Brumby’s Bakery.

Ben Mendelsohn as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood.

Now, thanks in no small part to his role as the insidious, dead-eyed gangster, Pope, in David Michod’s 2010 Aussie crime thriller Animal Kingdom, he’s carved out a lucrative niche as Hollywood’s villain of choice.

In the last six years, he has broken bad for Christopher Nolan in The Dark Knight Rises, Ridley Scott in Exodus: Gods and Men and Steven Spielberg in Ready Player One, as well as embracing nefarious roles in Star Wars: Rogue One and next year’s Marvel Cinematic Universe chapter, Captain Marvel.

“It’s been extraordinary,” he says of his career renaissance. “But that’s what has been very sweet about it — you don’t expect that in this business. And also with the kind of career that I have had — such as it is — and having that success, you just don’t expect it.

“I think as an actor you expect that some time in your 20s is going to be your prime period of acting so I am still grateful and taken aback by how it’s gone. It is still a sweet surprise and I still drive around and look back on a lot of years where things were leaner. I am still happily spun out by it.”

For his next movie, the umpteenth version of Robin Hood, he’s returning to the very beginning of his long involvement with the silver screen. The Disney animated version of the much loved “steals from the rich and gives to the poor” rebel was the first film he ever saw at the cinema as a child living in Germany. And true to recent form, he’s not on the side of the underdog outlaw, but rather is playing violent, bullying, corrupt antagonist, the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Finding something new in a role that has been played so many times is no mean feat — and Mendelsohn was adamant that he didn’t want to try to emulate what he considers the greatest of them all, the late Alan Rickman’s towering performance that well and truly stole 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves away from its Hollywood A-list star, Kevin Costner.

“He is absolutely the gold standard,” says Mendelsohn.

“One thing I said from the very outset was that is an untouchable performance — God bless him and God rest him. You can’t outdo or top that. That is a great Sheriff of Nottingham and it’s a completely sort of punk version of it too. So hats off to Alan Rickman.”

Aussies Tim Minchin as Friar Tuck and Ben Mendelsohn in a scene from Robin Hood.

Instead, after talking to director Otto Bathurst about the new high-octane version that would see Taron Egerton’s Robin shooting arrows like a machine gun and moving like he was in some kind of Middle Ages Matrix, Mendelsohn resolved to make his Sheriff a “brutish kind of survivor”, the victim of an abusive childhood who rises to power and influence through a potent blend of cunning, toadying and violence.

“I think that he is someone who is born into a rough place and time and obviously there is that descriptor of all sorts of unseaming stuff that you would go through at a young age. I think he is that kind of example of someone that decides that if you can’t beat them, join them — but get on top of them, as it were.

“Very often villains, to the degree that they have a backstory — it’s usually about something traumatic that they have reacted to in a way that makes them unpleasant and they just carry on with it.”

While Aussie audiences have known about “Full Mendo” — a term coined by comedian Mick Molly to describe his menace filled intensity — for years, his nickname is starting to go global. Compatriot Cate Blanchett was on the same episode of Jimmy Kimmel recently and remarked that she had just seen Mendo backstage in his trackie dacks, leaving the talk show host utterly perplexed.

“It’s very flattering to be part of the culture like that,” Mendelsohn says with a chuckle. “I love being part of the country. It’s an honour. And it’s an irreverent country — that’s important to us. I mean we have a PM called ScoMo. I have been away for a good while but I kind of love that about us.”

Ben Mendelsohn as Pope in Animal Kingdom, the role that put him on the Hollywood map.

He’s similarly grateful about the Aussie affection for the disreputable outsider. Not only does the country that embraces Ned Kelly as a folk hero love to hate the bad guys Mendelsohn brings to life on screen, but it also seems to be happy to look past his darker, more self-destructive days when he was his own worst enemy.

“I think we are more tolerant and less black and white about those things,” he muses. “I mean the whole loveable larrikin thing, which was an earlier reading of who I was. A bit poorly behaved, not pernicious, a bit dodgy, a bit of a muckaround. We’re OK with that stuff and that’s a pretty good thing. Australia throws up more than its fair share of genuine characters — genuine interesting, fun, cheeky people.”

As a long-time comic book and video game fan, Mendelsohn says he was thrilled to join the MCU for Captain Marvel, which opens next March. But at the very mention of the eagerly anticipated superhero blockbuster in which he plays a green-skinned, shapeshifting, power-hungry alien called Talos, the Marvel cone of silence comes down and he chooses his words very carefully.

“I can tell you that he’s nasty and very green,” he pauses, “and not a lot else. I can confirm that he’s not there to do good. I can say that much.”

And as glad as he is to be joining Oscar-winner Brie Larsen, Samuel L Jackson and Jude Law in the film, he admits he’s still a little ticked off that his fellow Aussie beat him to his favourite comic book character, Doctor Doom, in the distinctly dodgy 2005 version of Fantastic Four.

“I remember when Julian got that,” he says. “I think Doctor Doom is the best of them — he’s my personal favourite — but I’ll do my thing with Talos. It’s pretty cool. It’s been a great several years for crazy wish-fulfilment stuff.”

Robin Hood opens tomorrow.