Being Ben

HE AMBLED into the boardroom like a genial intruder. A scruffy presence among the objets d’art at Channel Nine’s Richmond headquarters, Ben Mendelsohn plonked himself down at the head of the table.

Reaching across the polished surface to remove the wrapping from a plate of biscuits and chocolates, there was something in his swagger of the “soft juvenile delinquent” he says he once was.

Mendelsohn disarms you with questions in response to questions, as if you know at least as much about his life as he does. “I just turned, 26, didn’t I? Yeah, 26. About a week ago.”
When he cites as an influence the Shakespearean actor Paul Scofield, it comes as a surprise. You’d think he might name Brando or some other mumbling practitioner of the method school of understatement.

If he ain’t articulate, it hardly matters. Lionised along with the likes of Russell Crowe, Aden Young and Noah Taylor, to him acting is hardly a cerebral endeavor.

Does he work hard at his craft? “At times, yeah. And then at other times you have to not work at it . . .

“You just have to plop yourself down and muck around. In a lot of ways, it’s more about that at times than it is about seriously mulling over stuff.”
It seems the aim at times is to lose yourself in the role. Such is his lack of inhibition, he had forgotten about nude scenes in a recent TV role. “It’s pretty normal for people to go through a bit of angst.

Once you are there naked around people, you’re there naked around people. It loses its worry.”
Mendelsohn won an Australian Film Institute award in 1987 for best supporting actor in `The Year My Voice Broke’.

At times, he comes across as just another of the many characters he plays. Then again he is not easily typecast. He has co-starred in films such as `The Big Steal’ and `Spotswood’, in both of these playing characters one writer has described as “sensitive, earnest, slightly eccentric adolescents who make dorks of themselves over girls”.

But, as he remarks, there is far more breadth to what he has done.

Even Trevor in `Voice’ was never quite that. Mendelsohn had flown in from Sydney to promote an episode of `Halifax f.p.’ in which he plays a young man found not guilty of murdering his teenage girlfriend on the ground of insanity.

He plays a self-obsessed philanderer, Dazey, in `Romper Stomper’ director Geoffrey Wright’s new film, `Metal Skin’.

Dazey is a vain and manipulative supermarket worker who has a way with women in this bleak look at early adulthood where jobs are menial, parents ineffectual and release is sought in “straight line” car racing.

In an early scene, co-star Aden Young’s character, on his first day on the job as a stacker, opens a storeroom door and happens upon Dazey in sexual embrace with a co-worker.

It is a film that had Young, who has an uncharacteristically unattractive role, noting similarities to a Bruce Springsteen song, `Racing in the Streets’: Some guys they just give up living.

And start dying little by little and piece by piece.

Some guys come home from work and wash up.

Then go racin’ in the street.

Also starring Nadine Garner and Tara Morice, the film, according to its blurb, is a story of “four young people looking for love in today’s fractured society where stable relationships of any sort are uncommon and the thrill of deep emotions all too
often turns savage”.

Mendelsohn is less forthcoming: “I think it’s about that element of being trapped in a really f….d situation.”
Set in Melbourne’s outer-western suburbs, `Metal’ is largely dominated by the performance of Young as a buck-toothed misfit and outsider, building a car in the dining room of the squalid house he shares with his intellectually impaired father.

Awed by Dazey’s charm with women, he becomes infatuated with the latter’s girlfriend, Roslyn (Garner). He thinks he has a chance with workmate Savina (Morice) after a wild night of boozing and drag racing at the railyards. But she is obsessed with Dazey and uses black magic to lure him.

The movie is a sometimes harrowing account not just of a youth subculture but of a desperation for many enduring bleak prospects in a grim setting that will surprise many blinkered from this by comfy suburbia and white-collar jobs.

Wright has written that the screenplay for `Metal Skin’ “ultimately has little to do with cars and a lot to do with a handful of lives on the psychological and geographical fringes of our sprawling cities”.

“I beat you!” “I beat you!” At one point in the Wright film, Dazey exults over a dying friend in a car he has rammed.

It’s enough to prompt idle thoughts about competitiveness in the industry. Sure, he is competitive, he says. But not on the job. Then each actor must concentrate on his or her particular role.

Talk about tensions throughout the film between the two leading male characters, Dazey and “Psycho” Joe (Young), and he politely takes your point on board, ever willing to accept varying interpretations.

Even if he does not agree.

“I think it’s important to leave those things up in people’s minds.

I think just from my experience people do tend to take away slight variations . . . of interpretations or whatever they get from things.

But um. Yeah.”
It is a receptiveness that he admires in director Wright, with whom he previously worked in the short film `Loverboy’.

“He’s pretty good with actors. He’s certainly got a lot of ear.

Meaning that he’ll throw . . . a character your way and he will be interested to just hear about your interpretations.”
Taller than you might expect, Mendelsohn fidgeted throughout the interview as though driven by nervous energy. Constantly changing position in his chair. Forever touching his face.

HE seems to have retained an adolescent gawkiness. There is a devil- may-care attitude about him, ever the scruffy kid in unbuttoned, pinkish shirt and jeans. He lolls about the boardroom. Fetches a bottle of mineral water from the fridge. Inspects the chocs and cookies. What is this stuff? Marzipan?
Mendelsohn was born in Melbourne but spent much of his youth overseas. His father was a medical researcher and the family lived in West Germany, Britain and the United States.

He concedes that acting gave his life direction and focus. “I was lucky. It came at a real clinching point in adolescence, too, you know.” He discovered the joys of acting at Banyule High School, in a role in `A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, the ideal introduction for a 14- year-old, he says.

That was after returning from America to stay with his grandmother in Rosanna. His parents had separated and he had been expelled from school in the US. “What did we do? I think I burned this kid’s possessions or something like that and then created a large cloud cover about it. I think they asked me about it and I denied it . . .”
He came back to Australia rather than face another four years at some strict boarding school. “I was probably a soft juvenile delinquent.”
Then there was the arrest for shoplifting “when I was 13 or 14 or 12 or something like that”. “Did I get busted for shoplifting in America? Did I shoplift in America? No. No. That was here. That was in Eltham.”
Ask about traits likely to aid a budding actor and he says: “You always see one of them in a bunch. The louder kid.”
The louder kid learnt from a friend at Banyule High that the production company Crawford’s was auditioning for `The Henderson Kids’ and gained his first professional role.

He has had parts in `The Flying Doctors’, `Special Squad’, `A Country Practice,’ `Prime Time’, `Neighbours’ and `Fame and Misfortune’.

After years in Melbourne, he now has a house at Bondi. At times he ponders what his life might have been without acting. “It depends on how the head’s running at the time, you know, as to what scenario comes up. You know. I possibly would have gone into science or computers or on the dole. I dunno.”
And the future? “I’ve drifted in and out of fantasy about, God, whatever, you know? About Hollywood or this or that, you know. Being sort of a bum when I’m 50. It just changes according to the day.”
Anthony Hopkins, co-star in `Spotswood’, once predicted: “I think he is going to be a big star one day.”
To Mendelsohn, career highlights have included moments in `Voice’ and the small hit `Nirvana Street Murder’, “bits of this and that all over the place”.

How do his parents feel now about their celebrated son? “They get happy about it but there’s no guarantee in this, you know? You don’t get to become head of the south-eastern acting division or anything.

It’s all up and down.”
And, laughing at the head of the long table in Nine’s boardroom: “Don’t put your daughter on the stage. All that sort of stuff.” You know.

THE SUNDAY AGE, 23-Apr-1995