Ben Mendelsohn in Bloodline: Hollywood’s dark and dangerous new star

Ten years ago his career had stalled. Now he’s feted for his dark, dangerous characters. How did Ben Mendelsohn do it?

Fresh faced: with Anthony Hopkins in Spotswood, in 1991. Picture: Headpress

Eye drops. A bottle of prescription pills. Two Minties. A phone. Ben Mendelsohn unpacks the pockets of his bulky wool overcoat and lines them up neatly on the table, inspecting them in the neon-pink seepage from the party flickering into life next door. “Better take these out,” he deadpans, striking a pose and tracing the rumpled outline of his coat with a fashion-model flourish. “They’ll ruin the line.”

There are plenty of fine-looking show ponies backstage at the Netflix Australia launch, marking time, flicking their polished manes as ­minders juggle headsets and clipboards while warning them to watch their heels on the soggy red ­carpet. Mendelsohn, 46, is not a show pony. Shuffling onto the carpet unfurled outside ­Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, he parks himself at the end of a row of imported Hollywood stars presenting themselves to the cameras. He leans against the wall. With the cumbersome coat bunched halfway up the thigh of lightweight powder-blue slacks, he is proudly and gloriously, as one onlooker mutters, “flying the dag flag for Australia”.

He’s also having a ripper of a time. “Corporate parties, oh yes, they are my bag,” he smirks, mirthfully aware that all evidence points to the contrary. He’s here with Daryl Hannah and TV darling Ellie Kemper and a bunch of guys in suits and what does he care? He’s the lovable mutt among the pedigrees at Crufts. He’s the dusty Holden ute at a classic car show. He’s Our Ben and, riding high on a crest of Hollywood glory, he’s home.

It sounds impossible, but he manages a grin at once lupine and sheepish, turning his face to the cameras as the bulbs flash and flare. And, oh what a face. Those lean, hungry features, the ­corduroy complexion and starving eyes, have recently created some of the most memorably off-kilter characters committed to film. They are larrikin low-lifes (Killing Them Softly, The Place Beyond the Pines), incoherently aggressive psychopaths (Animal Kingdom), jailbirds (Starred Up) and corrupt businessmen (The Dark Knight Rises); they are ferrety, drug-­addled, sweaty and menacing. Mendelsohn’s characters bring with them bad ideas, holey socks and a queasy sense that something is about to go terribly wrong.

“Ben looks a bit knocked around so I guess that’s why he gets those sort of parts,” says director Andrew Dominik, a friend of three decades’ standing who directed him in the Brad Pitt ­starrer Killing Them Softly. “He’s been to the puppet show, he’s seen all the strings. He’s ­somebody who’s lived.” For Animal Kingdom director David Michôd, Mendelsohn’s greatest strength as an actor is his unpredictability. “He carries danger with him everywhere, like anything could happen,” Michôd says. “For a director, that’s exhilarating. If you’re looking for an actor to play a character who is capable of creating chaos, it’s that unpredictability and danger you want. Ben’s the best in the business at it.”

The latest character to join Mendelsohn’s rogues’ gallery is Danny Rayburn, a shady drifter in the noir family drama Bloodline. ­Netflix’s new original content series, following on from House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, is attracting rave reviews and has been renewed for a second season. Mendelsohn’s Bloodline co-stars include screen legends Sissy Spacek and Sam Shepard as well as Kyle ­Chandler, who is much loved stateside for his Emmy-winning turn in the football drama ­Friday Night Lights. But here’s the thing: no one’s talking about the Americans. “Kyle ­Chandler isn’t Bloodline’s star. This unknown actor is,” ran a recent headline in the US magazine Wired. Film news website IndieWire said simply: “Ben Mendelsohn steals the show.”

That’s why he’s here tonight, at this glamorous, neon-lit party, sipping Coke on ice with an amused air against a thumping backdrop of electronic music. He may not be putting on the Ritz, but he is friendly and accommodating. He smiles and waves and poses with a toy koala. These are great times for Ben. Great, great times. It sure beats unemployment.

It was 2002 when it all started to go wrong for one of Australia’s favourite sons. Fifteen years of steady work, interspersed with a bit of what he has referred to as “excessive hedonism” (“I could tell you so many crazy stories but there’s no way you could publish them,” teases an old friend) ended in three lean years when, Mendelsohn says, he “couldn’t win a chook ­raffle”. Living in Sydney, he relied on a girlfriend “who was good to me” and filled his days walking her dog and watching league. In Melbourne, he’d worked as a kitchen hand and in a bakery and, after three years of unemployment, he was considering giving up acting and getting a service job. “I had a time limit and by about 2005, I felt the clock running down,” Mendelsohn tells me as we settle in for a chat. “I’d had a very good run, but I felt like [continuing as an actor] just wasn’t looking viable.”

Then came the TV show Love My Way and, he says, “it just started to pick up again”. Back in the saddle after a couple of films, including Rachel Ward’s unsettling drama Beautiful Kate, Mendelsohn was tapped to play the cop-hating sociopath Pope Cody in Michôd’s Animal ­Kingdom. “The danger, obviously, was a key reason for me wanting to cast him,” the director says. “But also his incredible charm. I wanted the character to be unsettling and dangerous in a weirdly beguiling way.” The Melbourne-set crime drama won a top prize at the 2010 ­Sundance Film Festival, scored Jacki Weaver an Oscar nomination at the age of 63 and brought ­Mendelsohn to the attention of the wider world.

The actor turned 40 the day after Animal Kingdom wrapped, never imagining that milestone would mark the beginning of an explosive career second act as a Hollywood character actor. Brad Pitt became a fan after acting opposite Mendelsohn’s smack-addled deadbeat in Killing Them Softly. “There’s nothing more original than that character,” Pitt said during the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. “I’m in awe of what he pulled off.” Ryan Gosling, clearly unfazed by Mendelsohn having stolen scenes from under him in The Place Beyond the Pines, cast him in his directorial debut Lost River.

In 2013 he guest-starred in Lena Dunham’s Girls, and has since racked up an impressive array of film roles: in Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings and the Jude Law thriller Black Sea, as well as two movies that premiered at Sundance: Slow West, with Michael Fassbender, which opens here next month, and Mississippi Grind, with Ryan Reynolds. (In a review of the latter, Rolling Stone says of Mendelsohn: “we may now have a new greatest-actor-of-his-generation contender”.) “Animal Kingdom was everything,” Mendelsohn says now. “It’s very hard to see any of the subsequent stuff happening without it.”

Despite only recently starting to blip on America’s radar, Melbourne-born Mendelsohn grew up on camera. He was 14 when he landed his first acting role, in the police series Special Squad. “They were looking for some kid to play a part and they came to the schoolyard and there was this really loud, charming kid and that was Ben,” says Dominik. Mendelsohn’s childhood had been marked by upheaval: he lived with each of his divorced parents for a time, as well as with his grandmother, before attending boarding school in America. The family atmosphere of a film set felt like home. “I suspect for a lot of ­people who become actors there’s a feeling of wanting to be someone other than who they actually are,” he says. “I wanted to keep working because work was essentially fantastic — you got to be around people, you got to be in a family, and that family changed from job to job. It was like being in the circus.”

In 1985, Mendelsohn left home and became part of the Crawford Productions family, ­working on The Henderson Kids where he met Kylie Minogue; he later starred with Minogue on Neighbours and the two remain great friends. He is also close to other members of what he calls the “incredibly powerful and ­storied alumni” of the two shows and describes those early years as “a magical, special time”.

Two years later, at just 18, Mendelsohn won an AFI award for his role as a rebel heart-throb in the Aussie coming-of-age film The Year My Voice Broke and he was on his way. The madly gifted actor dominated local cinema in the late ’80s and early ’90s in films such as The Big Steal, Spotswood and Cosi, and became a reliably fascinating presence, although he was yet to develop the dark complexity that would later slay Hollywood.

The scaffolding had been laid, however, thanks in part to Travis Bickle. “I watched Taxi Driver about 70-something times in that period when I was a very young actor and was mesmerised by it; it was a revelatory experience,” he says. Martin Scorsese’s landmark film was fuelled by its central performance: Robert De Niro as the troubled, hate-filled Travis. “When you’re a young boy, you’re looking at older men for role modelling,” Mendelsohn says. “Before I loved De Niro, I loved Clint Eastwood, I loved John Wayne. And James Bond. It’s all tough guy stuff; it’s that thing of wanting to be able to handle yourself in the wider world.”

Mendelsohn had some experience of that world — his father, an eminent neuroscientist, and his mother, a nurse, lived with him in ­England and Germany before separating when he was seven. But it was in Melbourne, while living in what he describes as the “rough-and-tumble” outer suburb of Research, that he first developed his swagger. “There was a lot of ­posturing there in the way Australian suburban guys can do and I learnt a bit of that,” he says. “We had been overseas when I was very young and had come back, so there was a pretty quick feeling of needing to adapt.”

While Mendelsohn says he was never ambitious in the sense that he wanted a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he is deadly serious about acting. “My view of it is the film or the play or the TV show, the thing that you’re there to do, is the thing that matters,” he says. “Getting that stuff as good as it can be is sometimes uncomfortable but you shouldn’t retreat from that because it’s difficult to achieve. I have a bunch of feelings inside me that I can go to; I have a sense of what different things feel like and I just try and find my way to those places.”

Mendelsohn is cagey about his private life, although he could talk about acting forever, with intelligence, thoughtfulness and a deep reverence. Today he’s got time to kill and he’s feeling expansive. “There is a larger arc than one’s personal comfort,” he says somewhat obliquely. It probably helps that he is kicking back, arms stretched along the headrest, on a plush white couch aboard Air Force One.

It’s not the American president’s plane, of course, but a reasonably upscale facsimile, part of a party lounge themed in honour of White House drama House of Cards, and it’s providing Ben with a little-needed excuse to lark around. “Let’s do the wave,” he says out of nowhere, so we link arms and turn in the doorway at the top of the aircraft steps, waving to a largely empty room, where a DJ is starting a sound-check. “Wanna see my presidential power?” he shouts above the noise before walking off and having a word. The music stops.

“Ben is not a sit-still kind of person,” I’ve been told and it’s true: he’s as wriggly as a ­toddler. He fidgets and shifts in his seat, glances down at his feet and jiggles his knees. He makes eye contact infrequently but when he does, his ice-blue eyes are dancing. There’s certainly none of the lurking menace that invigorates his on-screen presence; he is polite, almost courtly, with an easy charm. In contrast to his jittery physicality, his voice emerges in a lolling, laconic drawl, as if strained through a dirty sock. “Look, no one is more surprised than I am by the last several years,” he says, rocking forward in his seat. “If you’ve been working since you were a teenager and working at a reasonably decent level, then you don’t expect that you’re going to be firmly in your 40s and start moving up in the world, if you like. It’s pretty good. Yeah, things are going well.”

Here are some of the things critics are saying about Our Ben as he enjoys his midlife career surge: He is Hollywood’s new go-to for sleazeballs and scumbags. He’s cornered the market in psychopaths. He is really, really good at playing a walking virus. A walking virus!

“Yeah, I like that one,” Mendelsohn grins. “I attempt to take them as compliments as much as I can. Once upon a time, they thought I was a sweet, wide-eyed boy who just wanted the opportunity to kiss the girls, so I guess in the mode of ‘bad guys’ that feels to me like a job well done.” Playing unsavoury fringe-dwellers “tends to be more interesting,” he says. “They don’t have the aspirational qualities that your more solid up-and-down characters have, but I think they have a different energy, there seems to be more going on for them.”

The first time Mendelsohn tried his luck in America was in 1989. He went back and forth a number of times, auditioned for a couple of things, but nothing happened. “Things would come relatively close, I’d get a bit of reinforcement about my aptitude, if you like, that I was someone who could do this, but I wouldn’t get a job,” he says. He didn’t much care. He was honing his technique. “I didn’t feel like I’d got good enough at the job itself yet. I had very strong ideas about being technically good enough. There are certain preconditions to stepping up to do this stuff.”

When Andrew Dominik first met Ben ­Mendelsohn, in a Melbourne public toilet, Mendelsohn was dressed as a penguin. The director who would go on to launch Eric Bana’s film career with Chopper and direct Brad Pitt in two films was 18, and making a ­student film. Ben, also a teen, had just won the AFI Award and one of the other actors brought him along to play the part of an alcoholic penguin. “We were very impressed because there was an urban legend that Ben had turned his AFI award into a bong,” recalls Dominik. “It’s not true but it ought to be. He was a great penguin.”

Mendelsohn moved to Sydney’s Bondi seven years later. Dominik was living in nearby ­Bellevue Hill and days would begin with Ben calling to ask where they were going for breakfast. “Ben’s always been the same,” says Dominik, who rewrote the part in Killing Them Softly to get his talented mate on board. “He’s got a swagger, you know, and there’s also a little bit of anxiety under it all, driving it. He hides his fears beneath a whole lot of bravado.”

That tension is what makes him so unpredictable on screen — and in person. “For ­whatever reason he seems to have trouble ­letting the air in a room just ­settle,” says Michôd. “He likes it to ripple; sometimes he likes it to roil. But he is incredibly smart and funny, so that roil is never less than entertaining. Often, it’s intoxicating.”

Dominik agrees. “Ben’s a compelling person,” he says. “His sensitivity is all over his face and I think people naturally feel some sort of protectiveness toward him. I’ve watched Ben with girls over years and years, you know, and he’s really good at being oh, cute little puppy, and, oh, they want to take care of him. But he’s a lot more than most can chew.”

In LA-based British writer Emma Forrest, though, Mendelsohn met his match. His wife is said to be “smart and tough”, and has a ­public past as convoluted as her signature mass of corkscrew curls. Forrest became a music critic for The Sunday Times at just 15, before moving to New York and then LA, where she hobnobbed with movie stars — she dated Colin ­Farrell — and became a successful screenwriter. The demons that plagued her, though, were laid bare in a frank, wittily written 2011 memoir, Your Voice in My Head, chronicling her battle with manic-depression. Forrest, 38, wrote about self-harm and suicide attempts, as well as her salvation at the hands of a psychiatrist.

Michôd borrowed Cupid’s wings to introduce the couple at an Australians in Film party in LA. “I knew Emma and she said to me, ‘That guy in your movie was so repulsive and so sexy at the same time, I can’t work it out’,” Michôd says. “I said, ‘Maybe you should meet him. That might help you work it out.’” Mendelsohn and Forrest were married in 2012 at her old writing hangout, West Hollywood’s storied Chateau Marmont, and they have a one-year-old daughter. (Mendelsohn also has a 10-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.)

Fatherhood has shaped Mendelsohn in all the usual ways. “I think you get to that point where, um, I just think things get real,” he says. “You have children and you go, ‘OK, we’ve got to make sure all the basics are there, that food’s coming to the table’ and all those sort of things. It grows you up.” He finds the differences in culture between Australia and America subtle but profound and often feels “giddy, like we’re standing up on a really tall building here and this doesn’t feel like Australia, this feels like, whoa, this is a different place.”

Rewind to March 2014. Three folding chairs are lined up in a row on the Bloodline set in the Florida Keys, an end-of-the-road archipelago of mangrove-and-sandbar islands off the southern coast of Florida. A ­languid paradise of teal-coloured waters and soft breezes, where alligators and giant jowly manatees roam, the Keys hide an underbelly of seedy desperation. It’s the place those who reject life on the mainland escape to. Cast and crew have come here to make a dark-hearted drama about a dynastic family being torn to shreds. Mendelsohn, naturally, plays the black sheep, the prodigal son who returns to the family-run inn at the end of the world and starts to cause trouble.

It’s the first day of filming. The cameras are yet to roll but already Mendelsohn’s looking shifty. He leaves the room with the folding chairs then comes back in again. He sidles up to the onset photographer, mutters a request from behind his hand. See those chairs? Can you take a photo of that for me? The photographer doesn’t get it. Those chairs over there, just … can you take a photo? The chairs have names on the back of them, you see. It’s the same on every film set. These chairs, all in a row, display these names: Sissy Spacek, Ben Mendelsohn, Sam Shepard. Our Ben, sandwiched between two legends.

“For the 15-year-old that started doing this, that was” — there’s a long pause as Mendelsohn shifts uncomfortably in the seat of the faux Air Force One back here in Sydney, recalling the scene — “that was a very … to me that was a very beautiful moment,” he says. He clears his throat, shuffles in his seat. “I’m having a shy attack now as we talk about this.” He pulls the overcoat tight around him. Looks at the ground. “If you had told that kid …” He laughs, goes quiet. “That just felt like, OK, it doesn’t matter what happens now, that’s awesome, that’s more than I ever … I ever would have expected. I would never have even dreamt of that.”