Ben Mendelsohn

Ben Mendelsohn

03-Apr-1969


Australia


Actor

QUOTES BY Ben Mendelsohn


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

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.

I think now there's much more of a confessional culture. That's not my bag. I come from a slightly older school of thought: 'give 'em nothin.' You don't plead guilty.

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

As an outsider in America, you do see the kind of hypocrisy that's rampant there.

I think there's a lot of mythos about what's required in acting. The way that actors talk about acting is generally quite punishing, and I think actors want to put forward the idea that they do all of this work because, you know, it's a post-De Niro world, when, largely, in fact, it's almost never true.

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.

Acting is a bit of a heart and soul exercise with me. It's kind of all I've got.

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.

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