Top 50 Ben Mendelsohn Quotes

I never felt like someone who was boyish and coming to terms with asking girls out or anything like that, which was what ‘The Big Steal’ and ‘Spotswood’ were about. But I guess that’s the impression I left on people.

If you’re a ‘character actor,’ you get hired to play baddies a lot.

I think Kyle Chandler is something of a national treasure.

The thing about acting is you have to wait to be asked to the dance.

My favorite-ever version of ‘King Lear’ is the 1971 film by Peter Brooks. He has this enormous fur thing, and it adds enormous gravitas.

Once upon a time, they thought I was a sweet, wide-eyed boy that was just trying to figure out how to kiss the girl. Lots of comic relief and adolescent yearnings.

My general feeling about approach to work is that anyone that’s there, they’re all there to do the best job they can.

One of my earlier films is ‘Quigley Down Under.’ That was early on in my career, and that was horsey.

I basically sat around unemployed in Sydney for three years straight, and the two things that saved me were the rugby league and my dog.

It’s good to surf whatever waves are going on right there as they’re happening.

I think there’s a lot of mythos about what’s required in acting.

I was with my grandmother, while one of my brothers lived with my dad, and one lived with my mom. It wasn’t a great situation. Acting was the one good thing I was involved in.

In a very real sense, all you do when you’re shooting film or television is you shoot a scene, and then you shoot another scene, and then you shoot another scene.

Accents are always difficult in their way, but as long as you’re not throwing an audience off with it, then that’s all it should be.

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.

I’ve spent various periods of my career being thought of as various things, various degrees of substance and ideas.

I’m very cagey by nature.

I mean, there’s a sense wherein you skip a part of childhood, too, when you start working at that age I did; I was out working and out of home at 15, paying my own way in the world.

‘Star Wars’ is populated by so many great types; who wouldn’t want to be a Han Solo kind of dude?

It would be excellent to do a ‘Star Wars.’

I’ve been a Ryan Reynolds fan since the first time I saw him.

When you’re a young boy, you’re looking at older men for role modelling. Before I loved De Niro, I loved Clint Eastwood; I loved John Wayne. And James Bond.

Fassbender is fearless; he’s a fearless actor.

You can certainly extend your adolescence. There’s people that are very good at extending it indefinitely.

I came from the outer suburbs of Melbourne, so you do learn how to survive in that environment.

The first ‘Star Wars’ film was enormously important. I grew up right smack-bang in the sweet spot of all of those. It’s true cinema magic. It’s fair to say that, as a kid, I would have been very happy to be Han Solo, and I would have been happy to have gone out with Princess Leia.

I have an intensive relationship with the thing that I’m working on, and I hope that comes through. It’s better for me to not worry about the things I can’t fix once they’re done.

At 15 I had moved out of my parents’ place, and my options were looking pretty narrow. But I had this acting thing and I just wanted to be able to keep going because it was really good. That was all I wanted.

‘Animal Kingdom’ was an amalgam of two people that I had met-slash-known, not particularly well. They were both very, very scary people for very different reasons.

Most young actors, that’s all they’re trying to do: Get better at acting and be able to keep doing it. And that doesn’t work out for most people.

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.

The people I’ve encountered who are really dangerous in my life don’t go around with their fangs drawn – they are dangerous because of the way they interpret what’s going on.

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.

‘Animal Kingdom’ is a lot of things, but it’s not heartwarming.

I don’t believe in the transformation myth, where if you have more success, life changes for you.

One of the things that I found very confronting in my early working life was that people thought I was some sensitive doe-eyed lovelorn boy, because they’d seen me do that a couple of times. What tends to happen is you get a run of similar roles.

For mine, the villains of the piece were always important. In a traditional sense, that’s always an important role.

I remember ‘The Yearling’ was the first film I ever saw, and my mom told me I cried for about four or five days afterwards. I’d be going along during the day and suddenly start crying over what had happened to the little deer.

It’s a tougher gig than what people think it is. The proper, real, genuine, worldwide movie stars don’t get a lot of downtime from the world outside. That’s a tougher price, I think, than what people’s fantasy of fame account for.

I did ‘Quigley Down Under,’ which is quite deliberately placed in Australia, which is a Tom Selleck, Alan Rickman, Laura San Giacomo film from ’88, I want to say.

There’s very little different between the way the government operates in America and the way criminals do.

‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’ is one I watched again and again and again in the early days of VHS.

In Australia, even the darkest subject matter has a little pinch of humor. A little sweet to make the sour go down.

The very rough story is this: Melbourne boy, out of both my parents’ houses at a young age, lived with my grandmother, drama teacher twisted me into doing this TV thing that I thought my mates were doing, too.

As an actor who has spent twenty years trying to crack America, the day I reached the ‘Bloodline’ set and found my name on a chair next to Sissy Spacek’s was the happiest of my working life.

The thing about home is that it’s a tough place to sustain a career, just by dent of the size of the place. I had about as good a run there as anybody, but it’s still a tough ask. I mean, the person I think with the best career in Australia is Ray Meagher, in ‘Home and Away.’

The people that impress me are Bob Dylan. The ones who keep working, year in and year out, and keep coming up with stuff.

Fifteen years old, out in the world, acting was all I had.

At any period of an actor’s life, it’s fairly likely that they’ll be cast in ways that are reminiscent. That’s the way it goes.

I generally feel like people that are doing the wardrobe know more about wardrobe than I do, and they have an overview.