Ben Mendelsohn Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.