Ben Mendelsohn Quotes

I played Benedick in 'Much Ado About Nothing' nearly 30 years ago at the RSC, alongside Susan Fleetwood as Beatrice, and I loved every minute.

I've always wanted to play 'Lady Macbeth' and Strindberg's 'Miss Julie'.

I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.

At the beginning of my acting career, I worked for two seasons at the RSC and spent a lot of time in the Cotswolds exploring Shakespeare's countryside. It's my kind of English landscape, with its tiny villages and one-room thatched pubs.

I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.

I've played almost every lead character from Henry VI to Othello. I'm dying to tackle Richard III sometime.

Hamlet, that's the only role there is, finally. The only role. After that, you settle down and only do the fun things on stage.

I would love to play Richard III.

When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.

I mean, look, I wear makeup in films. I don't wear makeup in real life. It's just part of the gig, that's all.

Every movie you attack has its challenges, and I was excited about the challenges presented by 'Deadpool.' I was a huge fan of the original, and I think, as a director, you have to put the script first.

Characters never live with me in film the way they do on stage, and they have certain ramifications that movies just never have.

'Underworld' was my first filmed book. I think there are about seven of my lines in it.

I can relate to anything. I once played Macbeth. I got a lot of laughs, so I quit.

'Richard III' is a really difficult play to film - it's involved, often obscure. I felt it absolutely necessary to do more simplification than I've ever done before.

One of my favourite pieces is 'Antony and Cleopatra' - I'd love to be in that. Or an alternative version of 'Romeo & Juliet' where I get to play Mercutio, something like that.

I think Baz Luhrmann's 'Romeo + Juliet' is a work of genius.

When I was younger, I acted in some Shakespeare stuff; I did one Shakespeare camp.

For 'Tevar' we chose Amit Sharma to do the Hindi version of the Telugu hit 'Okkadi' because we wanted to change the flavour and mood of the original.

'Defying Gravity' is a big, theatrical, grand gesture. In film, how do you match that?

Learning a craft is up to you, whether you are doing theatre or movies.

Theatre is something that keeps me very alert, and I am actively creating whether I am on stage or directing. In films, I feel I become more of an introvert, going deeper in the realism of a character.

In a big movie, like Ridley Scott's 'Kingdom of Heaven,' where I had a small part, you realize your task is to support everything that has to come together. You're just a piece of the puzzle. You're the guy in the hat.

The think that we hung the film version all on was 'Hedwig' on tour. On stage, it's one theatre, one show. It just seemed natural to change it. In the film, we were able to go to flashback rather than have her talk to the audience. And we had the play to practice and to see where we had made mistakes.

I'm doing a play at Trafalgar Studios with The Jamie Lloyd Company - 'The Maids' by Jean Genet with Uzo Aduba and Laura Charmichael, directed by Jamie Lloyd. It's one of my favourite plays by one of my favourite playwrights.