Ben Mendelsohn Quotes

I love to start characters in a place where you think you know them. We can make all kinds of assumptions about them and think they have no redeeming qualities, but like everyone, they're complex.

There's more depth to Lionel. What I am finding so interesting about playing him is there's all these different layers. I prefer playing Lionel because he's a human being.

I always respond to characters who have depth. I'm always interested in those people. They're the ones who surprise you.

If a role has been too one-dimensional, I have turned it down.

I suppose I flee to life. I'm most interested when conversations become difficult.

I'm attracted to playing characters that have flaws.

I believe strongly that characters are five-dimensional, and they're complicated, and life is complicated, and people are complicated.

I totally respond to complex characters, and I'm not interested in anything too simple.

I think any character has to be well-rounded, whether they are male or female - they have to be complex and make choices that maybe we don't agree with, you know? I guess that's what makes them human.

As human beings, of course, we're all compromised and complex and contradictory and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there's room for me to express them, that's a part I'd love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional.

Even if I'm playing a bad guy, I work hard to make him multi-leveled and interesting.

I always tell my students to complicate your characters: never make it easy for the reader. Nobody is ever one thing. That's what makes characters compelling.

The more complicated the character, the better I am. It's the one-dimensional crap that I had to do for years that drove me crazy.

I'm always just drawn to those roles that present one way and have many other things going on underneath. It's just more fun to play as an actor.

I love playing characters who are multilayered and multidimensional and have a darkness to them, which makes them more realistic and more fun to play.

I look forward to parts that have a dimension or depth to them. This makes it interesting for me to do and the audience to watch. Whether he's a chocolate boy die hard romantic or a gangster with swag, every good has a little bad and every bad has a little good in them.

I want to give my characters nuance.

It's fun playing two roles. The roles provide a wonderful range of emotions. Stuart is childlike and sensitive. Adam is ruthless, outrageous. He's flamboyant. He does the unexpected.

It's not that I bounce ideas off of my children as much as it is that having children has had a profound effect on the way I see the world. They have mined my soul. They've made me a better person and therefore a more empathetic writer.

As an actor, I'm constantly striving to find the darkness in the lighter characters and the lightness in the darker characters.

We're not one thing, as human beings, so any character that is written uni-dimensional, that's just a shallow character with shallow writing and shallow acting.

I never play a villain that I don't have something I can either do or say so the audience sees there is something redeemable about them. In other words, I don't want to do evil for evil's sake. I don't want to do Jason slasher movies. There's no point in that.

Sometimes, the smaller roles in movies can be the most interesting. If you only take the stance that you'll only play central characters in movies, you'll find yourself not being able to indulge in that morally grey terrain that makes support characters so rich and interesting.

My biggest fantasy as an actor is to be in situations that make me uncomfortable and force me out of my comfort zone.

I like it when the deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away.