“What am I going to do?”: The role that single-handedly saved Ben Mendelsohn’s career
It’s not something that gets spoken about too often, but along with making spiders as big as puppies, hats with dangly bits of cork on them and whatever the hell kangaroos are, Australia has also produced a long list of very fine Hollywood actors over the years, including Ben Mendelsohn.
While he may not be a household name around the globe, his movies are certainly well known; blockbusters like Gareth Edwards’ brilliant Star Wars spin-off Rogue One in 2016, Spielberg’s migraine-inducing Ready Player One and last year’s very overlooked but actually very good Channing Tatum comedy Roofman. Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, ‘Hold on a second, is this a successful Hollywood actor like Chris Hemsworth and Margot Robbie, who didn’t appear in either Neighbours or Home and Away?’, but worry not, because of course he did.
Mendelsohn featured in 22 episodes on Ramsay Street back in 1986, and he went on to work consistently in his home country, on movies and TV for the next couple of decades, but it was Hollywood that he wanted to be in, and so he relied on the generosity of Aussie stars who had already made it in America, couch-surfing and staying with the likes of Nicole Kidman and Heath Ledger while he struggled for money and went to auditions for movies, a difficult time that he recalled on the Aussies in Hollywood podcast.
He explained, “By about that time, 2007, 2008, it was pretty obvious that nothing was happening. My 30s were ending, and I was going to have to think about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Now, I knew I could go back, and I could work at home, but I didn’t know that. I thought, I don’t really, I’m not sure that that’s what I want to do. So I had a time limit on it, and then that time limit ran out. And then I thought, what am I going to do?”
Mendelsohn headed back to ‘Down Under’, picking up jobs on several films, including Nicolas Cage’s spooky hit Knowing, much of which happened to be filmed in Australia. He also had a small role in Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s aptly-named Australia in 2008, but was still finding it tough to get the kind of billing he wanted.
He added, ”I got a ton of work at home, and that was around about, I don’t know, 2008, 2009. And the last job of that, I think I did five or six things in a row, and the last one of those was Animal Kingdom”.
Along with LA Confidential’s Guy Pearce and future Train Dreams star Joel Edgerton, Mendelsohn had a major role in the 2010 crime thriller that critics loved, with Jacki Weaver being nominated for an Oscar for her performance. It proved to be exactly the kind of springboard that Mendelsohn needed, and he won three industry awards for his work on the film.
He began to get more attention back in the States and appeared in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises before going on to carve a niche in Hollywood as a superbly effective villain or bad guy, winning an Emmy award for the Netflix drama Bloodline and appearing in big franchises like Marvel’s Captain Marvel and Spider-Man, plus last year’s Star Wars series Andor.
Later this year, he’ll be seen alongside Benedict Cumberbatch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the Jo Nesbo adaptation Blood on Snow, his days of uncertainty long behind him.
