Jeff Heller
Ben Mendelsohn is an acclaimed Australian actor known for his compelling performances across film and television. He gained significant recognition for his role in the film “The Year My Voice Broke” (1987), which established him as a rising talent. Over the years, he built a reputation for portraying complex, often morally ambiguous characters. Mendelsohn’s breakthrough international role came in 2010 with the Australian crime drama “Animal Kingdom,” where his portrayal of the menacing Andrew “Pope” Cody earned him widespread acclaim and opened doors to Hollywood. He starred in major films such as “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012), “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (2016), “Ready Player One” (2018), and “Captain Marvel (2019). His portrayal of Danny Rayburn in the Netflix series “Bloodline” (2015-2017) earned him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series.
Mendelsohn is currently starring as famed fashion designer Christian Dior in the AppleTV+ drama “The New Look,” which tells the story of how Dior and his contemporaries, including Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche), navigated the waters of high fashion against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied France during World War II. He had the project brought to him by “Bloodline” producer and showrunner Todd “Adam” Kessler. “He was at my place and he was making a pizza from scratch and he told me that he’d read Christian Dior’s autobiography,” said Mendelsohn. “He was talking about the struggle between Christian’s private self and who he felt he had to be in his public self to conduct the business And I just said, ‘When are we doing it?’ That was five years or so before we got to do it. Danny in ‘Bloodline’ was arguably the most important character I ever played, so whatever Adam wanted to do was great. But the fact that that the first thing that he talked about was the feeling of Christian’s shame and self recrimination, I was just like, ‘Oh, let’s go.’ Because I understood it. I understood it as a person that has spent some time in the public eye, but I also understand it as a performer on all sorts of levels. I would have followed Adam down many, many roads, but I had no idea how fulfilling, how challenging, how scary this role was going to be.”
In his research for the role, Mendelsohn dug deep into the world of the fashion world and the life of Christian Dior. “As you get to Paris and you speak to fashion experts, and they tell you about Christian and they tell you about that world, so I became familiar with the situation of his family and really the situation of the other designers,” said Mendelsohn. “I thought those relationships were really important and understanding who’s who in the zoo. I watched footage of him. I think if you’re lucky enough to be able to watch someone, you can, you can get a sense of them. He’s a person. He’s a much classier person than I am. I think people of that time were classier in a general sense as well. I love him more than anyone I’ve ever played and I loved him the more and more I portrayed him.”
Mendelsohn is known for portraying characters with slightly dubious morals, so he found it refreshing to play someone so earnest and insecure. “He’s a very atypical heroic figure,” said Mendelsohn. “I think he is a real hero. “He’s genuine. What he did after the war in France is just amazing, and what he did during the war is pretty amazing too. I think I knew that page was turning for me when I did “The Outsider.” That was really when I was like, ‘Oh yeah, now I’m going from bad guy to the good guy. But it’s really nice to play someone that is coming from a very different place, and to try to connect to an audience.”
Christian is a very distraught and very fragile throughout the series, which Mendelsohn found challenging to maintain. “There’s a period in the in the middle where we were shooting that was kind of like wandering through some strange horror hallway and just running on sort of fumes,” said Mendelsohn. “It was very intense work, and I thought at the time, ‘I’ve just done the hardest work of my life.’ I don’t know whether or not it’s the most effective or the best, but it certainly was the hardest. [Director] Helen [Shaver] would push things, and would want to go to further, further, further. So, we would do stuff to the point where there was unconsolable kind of feelings. That was her genius, really. Not stopping. And [director] Julia [Ducournau] also had a really strong connection to what she wanted and how she wanted it. So it was a gift to have these very muscular female directors, making sure that they got what they wanted and as they wanted. But yeah, it’s, it was taxing, but you know, that’s good. It’s like swimming. You’ve got to turn your head up and grab some oxygen. Then you got to go back down.”
Christian and his sister Catherine have a very special relationship, which really shows the performances of Mendelsohn and his costar, Maisie Williams, despite the two actors having never met before. “We didn’t know each other from Adam,” said Mendelsohn. “But she’s got a magic about her. I think the fact that we were aware of each other prior was really helpful. But you have to understand that Todd had never seen “Game of Thrones.” He had no idea who she was. She wasn’t being looked at for that role at all. He saw her reading for something else and went, ‘She should read for Catherine.’ And she was the only person that we met with. And she was just so serious and so committed. Her questions were great. She was just such a humble, awesome person. And we just really gave permission to each other, and we also had to refashion it enough to be like siblings to get pissy with each other and not be too close. It’s really her quality. She’s a really remarkable person and she’s just very, very brave.”
“The New Look” was shot on location in Paris, which Mendelsohn found helped inform his performance. “We were really adamant that if we were gonna do it, we really wanted to do it in Paris,” said Mendelsohn “If it meant we had to cop less bucks or whatever it meant, we really did not want to have to move from Paris because I think Paris does inform you. And I am a real outsider. I can’t claim to know Paris, you know? And I can’t claim to know Christian either, but I can write a love letter. Paris really is like just one of those places that you just look around and it’s just incredible. It’s really such a beautiful city and it just kind of takes you over a bit. I’m a new world guy. I come from Australia, so it’s a very particular thing to be there and to be, have a sense of that culture and how much has happened and gone through there. So, to come in as an outsider, to come in and say, ‘Hi, I’ll be your Christian Dior,” there’s some chutzpah to that. And to be honest, that was one of the most daunting things for me was to come in, to not be a French person, to be playing a French person with my accent.”
As for Mendelsohn’s own fashion sense? “Listen, I think you can take the boy out of the Melbourne suburbs, but it is tough to take the Melbourne suburbs out of the boy,” he said. “I have a very basic fashion sense. I wouldn’t rate it particularly high, but I have had the opportunity to become more informed. And I certainly have a much greater respect for what fashion is and does.”
You can watch our full interview with Ben Mendelsohn, including discussions about perfecting his French accent and working with John Malkovich, below.
“The New Look” is currently streaming on AppleTV+.
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