Ben Mendelsohn on The Outsider, Hollywood and keeping it real

Given the degree to which he’s now cornered the market in men who’ve been around the block, it’s hard to imagine Ben Mendelsohn’s current career without the lean years.

Ben Mendelsohn.

Most actors don’t ring journalists direct. They leave it to their reps to connect lines and to apologise for the inevitable delays. Ben Mendelsohn is the exception, making calls from his base in Los Angeles and loudly sorry about his tardiness, though it’s only a few minutes past the time we’d scheduled to chat. “I want to be able to answer [journalists’] questions in good faith,” he explains, “and, you know, if I’m still standing at the crease, they’ll f..king bowl another ball, and I forget to call tea, mate! So I apologise for keeping you waiting.”

The actor’s fondness for a sporting metaphor might be one reason Australians view him with such affection, though his personal brand of sweary affability has long since gone global. Last year the internet delighted when he called Spider-Man an “absolute motherf..king pornstar”. (It was a compliment). And though he’s still capable of surprising, Mendelsohn’s on-screen persona is just as firmly established: in the past decade he’s played one villain after another, first in Animal Kingdom and then in a series of Hollywood blockbusters, with the odd scuzzy charmer (Killing Them Softly, Mississippi Grind) thrown in for good measure.

His latest role, as a small-town cop in HBO’s 10-part series The Outsider, is neither of those things. But it makes effective use of a certain hangdog quality the actor has had from the beginning. Mendelsohn plays Ralph Anderson, tasked with investigating the brutal rape and killing of an 11-year-old boy. The case at first seems open-and-shut: several witnesses point the finger at Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman), Little League coach and all-round family man, and his DNA is all over the crime scene. But Terry claims to have been out of town at a teacher’s conference at the time of the murder, and video emerges that backs up his story.

Ben Mendelsohn in The Outsider.

Based on a novel by Stephen King and adapted by Richard Price (The Wire, The Night Of), The Outsider mashes their sensibilities together to fascinating effect, wedding procedural nitty-gritty to a tale of supernatural horror. The two don’t always sit easily alongside one another, especially in the season’s back half, but it’s gripping nonetheless. Mendelsohn makes for a suitably world-weary anchor, as well as an audience avatar of sorts; the gradual dismantling of the character’s scepticism easing us, slowly but surely, into the possibility of the otherworldly.

He was lured back to TV, Mendelsohn says, on the strength of a meeting with executive producer Bateman, who delivered “literally the greatest pitch I ever got in my life”. The Arrested Development star directed the first two episodes in addition to playing one of the leads, and brings the same sense of queasy momentum to The Outsider that he gave the Ozark pilot a couple of years ago.

“Jason is one of those people who does not get [a big rap],” Mendelsohn says, “probably because he doesn’t seek it, in a way. But I knew he had it. What I didn’t know is that he is also the youngest-ever member of the DGA, the Directors Guild of America. He’s been directing since he was 18. And not a lot of people know that, because he’s not a f..ker who goes around tooting his own horn.”

Ben Mendelsohn and Franco Castan in a scene from the The Outsider.

The visual language Bateman establishes for the show is cooly restrained, almost detached. Whole scenes play out in master shots without cutting to close-ups, and the camera has a kind of sinister omniscience. “It allows for a lot of tension,” agrees Mendelsohn. “It allows for a lot of grace and tension, like The Godfather. It’s very stately. And it allows emotion to sit.”

He might be saying all this in the abstract, of course, because it’s not entirely clear if the show’s leading man has even watched it. Mendelsohn famously avoids his own performances. He tries not to worry about results, he says, and while he’s glad The Outsider has been a hit, he admits he didn’t have unusually high hopes for it.

“I thought we had a good pedigree, but I never have great expectations. At heart I approach it like a pessimist. And I try to be a constructive pessimist, right? Cause what I figure…” He catches himself. “Can you f..king hear that? I said ‘figure’. That’s a very American word. It happens,” he says. I imagine him shaking his head at the other end of the line. “It happens.”

Mendelsohn has been living in America for a decade now, and he shot The Outsider over five months in Georgia last year. He enjoys it, though he misses the people and “the attitude” in Australia. “I watch the news from home and listen to stuff all the time,” he tells me. “Mainly cause Aunty’s got a bunch of stuff that’s easy to podcast.” But there’s also an undeniable high, he admits, in working Stateside. “When you come over here, the social gravity… it’s like walking on the moon.” I ask what he means. He declines to explain, scampishly.

The years in LA have no doubt made the accent easier, at any rate, and Mendelsohn now has just the right amount of grit, at 50, to play a classic American gumshoe. The character of Ralph is labouring under a sense of guilt, increasingly convinced that he nabbed the wrong man. But Mendelsohn is clearly not the kind of actor who takes a character’s internalised sadness – or rage, or whatever – home with him. The audience, he insists, does a lot of the work on his behalf. “As long as I look like a person who’s feeling that stuff. As long as I don’t look like I’m having a f..king ball. Part of the main job for the actors,” he says, “is just to not mess it up. Don’t get in the way of the story you’re telling.”

In the most significant departure from the book, Ralph is also mourning a dead son. I wonder aloud how an actor can play that very specific kind of ever-present grief without having experienced it. “You do experience it,” Mendelsohn says. “I haven’t lost a child but I’ve had enormous… I’ve had an enormous amount of grief. Of loss. I’ve lost a lot of people. It’s not necessarily common knowledge but suffice to say… I know what grief is. And the grief of the death of a child is just an extrapolation.”

The actor’s wild years, in which he indulged in a lifestyle he’s since described as excessively hedonistic, are now just part of his lore. The fresh-faced kid who broke out in The Year My Voice Broke at 17 seemed almost to be rebelling against the kind of squares he played in The Big Steal and Cosi.

Mendelsohn started playing leads before most of his peers, so it was a disconcerting experience to watch them race past him to forge glittering careers in Hollywood. Meanwhile, jobs at home were becoming thinner on the ground, as he aged out of the boyish types for which he had become known in the 80s and 90s. And by his late 30s that early success looked very distant indeed, culminating in three long years of unemployment.

“I said no to some stuff, this and that happened,” he says now. “And all of a sudden – zoom, zoom, zoom – off went a bunch of great luminary actors, and they stayed that way for a long time.”

Some of them – Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, Simon Baker and Rebecca Rigg – opened their doors whenever he tried his luck in LA, but nothing stuck. “I was a part of the Aussie mafia,” he says. “Just completely irrelevant to the Americans. And they didn’t really get it. Because I tried here for years.”

All the while he was telling Australian journalists (who never ceased to ask) that success abroad wasn’t the goal. Ironically, of course, it was a film shot in the actor’s home town of Melbourne that made all the difference. Directed by first-timer David Michôd, Animal Kingdom was followed by what Mendelsohn describes as a one-two punch: The Place Beyond the Pines, in which he starred alongside Ryan Gosling (who later cast him in his directorial debut), and Bloodline, the Netflix series that saw him working with titans Sissy Spacek and Sam Shepard.

Given the degree to which he’s now cornered the market in men who’ve been around the block, it’s hard to imagine his current career without the lean years. Does he regret any of those decisions made when he was young? There’s a long pause.

“It was very painful,” he says. “And there’s a way you can think about that with regret. But you don’t know how mistakes or calamities are going to end up. You really don’t. So it was about just plodding along and getting a break. And at the end of the day that’s all that happened. I really do owe it to David Michôd, because David opened the door. And I didn’t think David’s film was gonna work, you know? I don’t know shit. But I’ve picked myself up off the ­canvas.”

New episodes of The Outsider are available to stream every Monday on Foxtel.

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