Ben Mendelsohn quotes:

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.

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

You think of 'Outlaw Josey Wales,' you immediately think of the old Indian guy, Sondra Locke, the old lady with the glasses, beautiful old actress.

I had a pretty good career at home. What keeps you going is not having a plan B. It's a very good thing. I think if I had a viable plan B, I might not have kept going.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Before 'Animal Kingdom,' I wasn't particularly thought of in villainous roles.

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.

It's got a lot more room for nuance and an assumption that people have started from the beginning. 'Bloodline' ends up being like a really good novel.

I got the first job and kept going. Once I got a job, I very much wanted to keep getting jobs, basically. I did try to learn what I could in those first couple of decades.

Animal Kingdom' is a significant comet, and it's cast a tail. It's very hard to see anything post that happening without that.

I think it's that thing of growing up all the time watching American movies and listening to American music. It hits you in a way that's a lot purer because you are not in that culture that you're watching.

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.

Let me give you a little Mendelsohn 101: I came up in television in the early- to mid- 1980s in Australia.

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.

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 think I've benefited from not being hugely known. It means I have to do something really effective to be noticed.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I think some of my favorite Australian films were shot by people that are not Australian. And I think when Dean Semler did 'Dances with Wolves,' for instance, that's a very different-looking Western than what you've seen much of before. It's very rich, color-wise. But we've got our own very proud thing going on.

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.

It would be excellent to do a 'Star Wars.'

I'm very interested in the history of Christianity, and what I can say for sure is that the Catholics and the Jesuits and stuff were very big on teaching and on learning.

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.

Slow West' is a western, and it's sort of a twist on the genre stylistically, I think, from what I understand going in.

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.

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

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

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

$3,000 from a residual cheque was all I made one year.

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

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.

I think Kyle Chandler is something of a national treasure.

Typically, I'll wake up at 4:30 in the morning. It's just the continual jet lag residue, just weird sleeping hours.

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

I don't have memorabilia but try to take a bit of wardrobe, usually because they dress me better than I dress myself.

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.

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 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.

If you're going to be a father and whatnot, yeah, you better be responsible about it as best you can.

I don't know that it exists, the perfect family. It's always complicated.

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

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

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.

Crewing and being on film sets is kind of like being in the carnival, with carnie folks.

If you ride like lightning, you're gonna crash like thunder.

There are two things: 1) what things one does in the world, and 2) what family one has. There's the two really tangible things that can stay.

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

There were the usual types of things that happen, in a production, like logistical bullshit, and this and that and the other. That's the sort of stuff that happened. But I never felt, in a creative sense, that we were ever veering into a place that I hadn't signed on for.

Acting is broad enough a church that you can pick your races, decide which way you want to go at different times.I think that the story and circumstance tends to dictate the most and then what you do with your own approach after that.

I think that story wins out over acting and that the thing as a whole is more important than the performances therein.

From my point of view, things don't have to change to get better. Things are fantastic.

People don't know who I am, and that's not a bad thing at all from my end.

Life is a lot sweeter, I think, than you can be aware of it at times.

As soon as you start acting in an accent, you're sort of out of your comfort zone. Maybe people start getting used to accents after a long period of time. But as soon as you do that, it's not so much as capturing the sound of the way other people speak, it's being able to actually be and move around in the sound.