Ben Mendelsohn

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

“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'm very cagey by nature.”

“I grew up loving the John Wayne and Clint Eastwood westerns.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“I've been a Ryan Reynolds fan since the first time I saw him.”

“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.”

“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 got a good-enough adolescence. 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.”

“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 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 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.”

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

“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 like to call up ghosts of things past for myself when I'm working a lot.”