Ben Mendelsohn falls in love easily.
“If I play someone who actually lived, I cannot help falling in love with him,” says the actor, appearing on Zoom from his home in Los Angeles to talk about his turn as Christian Dior in Todd A. Kessler’s “The New Look.”
“I love Rupert Murdoch because I played him,” he offers. He played a much younger (circa late 1950s), pre-Fox News version of the media baron in the 2002 Australian film “Black and White.”
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But it’s clear that Mendelsohn’s attachment to Dior — a revered, almost saintly, figure in the annals of fashion as much for his perfectionist adherence to craft and form as for his unbending devotion to the French ethos of fraternité — runs much deeper.
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“Christian is one of the most beautiful people that I’ve ever, ever encountered in a conceptual framework,” says Mendelsohn, leaning forward in his chair. “He was a man that experienced enormous amounts of feelings. He was ravaged in a really particular way. And yet he glides up through it and he just takes over the world. He is just an extraordinary man. Wow, I just love it. I love it so much.”
He was drawn to Dior’s passion (he launched his fashion house in 1946, amid the postwar devastation and destruction of the French economy) and his resiliency in the face of failures.
“We fantasize so much about what success is, what you have to do [to get it]. And it’s almost always utter f–king crap. The best people are completely surprising; they’re curious and enlivened by the engagement that they have with the world,” says Mendelsohn. “You can be fragile and you can make mistakes and still keep putting one foot in front of the other and go on and do amazing things.”
Wearing a crisp white dress shirt, unbuttoned at the neck and wrists, his salt-and-pepper hair in an upswept widow’s peak, Mendelsohn, 54, exudes a kinetic, restless energy. He chugs from a bottle of chocolate milk, spoons vanilla ice cream into his mouth, lights a cigarette, and then another. Alternately profane and impassioned, he speaks not just with his face, but his entire body, his arms and hands are in a perpetual state of gesticulation. More than once, waves of emotion bring him to tears.
He admits that he knew “nothing” about Christian Dior, the man, though he did have a passing awareness of the French luxury brand beginning in the late 1990s-early 2000s, during John Galliano’s audacious and controversial stewardship. And while he’s mostly a jeans and T-shirt kind of guy, he does admit to occasional flights of experimentation.
“I’ve got rings and necklaces that are outrageously bling,” he says. “And I have this jacket…” He trails off and then asks: “Do you want to go on a little walk? I have to show you this jacket.”
Laptop in hand, he’s now bounding through the house. He’s in the process of moving, and many of his belongings are already packed.
“It’s the most expensive, wonderful, crazy thing I’ve ever bought,” he says excitedly, rummaging through boxes, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He begins to sing — to the tune of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” — “Hello Dior, my old friend…you are the most awesome jacket ever…”
“There you are baby!” he exclaims, as he slips into a blue merino shearling coat from the Dior Men’s fall 2021 collection. He bought it in London for 7,000 pounds, just before “The New Look” began shooting in Paris in 2022.
“This is the best f–king jacket ever,” he says, turning toward the camera and lightly caressing a sleeve. “And I can almost never wear it. That’s the problem with great clothes — you’ve got to rise to them. And you never quite do.”
He also models a 1950s Mao-era military coat that he picked up in China more than 20 years ago and a highly coveted fishtail parka by Raf Simons. He learned about the Belgian designer (and onetime Dior women’s creative director) while listening to an interview with Virgil Abloh, who was an obsessive Simons collector.
“I had a girlfriend who told me, ‘Hey, you wear the clothes, the clothes never wear you,’” he says. “And I’ve started to get a bit more comfortable with that. But you know, I’m a bit shy.”
One of three boys born to a medical researcher father and nurse mother, Mendelsohn spent years living abroad in Europe and America, care of his father’s career. His peripatetic childhood seeded in him an adaptable emotional intelligence that would prove useful as an actor. But he was also lonely and alienated.
“I grew up with television,” he says. “It was so important. It was my friend.”
The family was affluent, but his father was cerebral and remote and so Mendelson and his two brothers largely fended for themselves in the psychological jungle of adolescent boyhood. The swagger and confidence of male action heroes made an impression, and provided emotional scaffolding.
“I wanted to be James Bond. I wanted to be Clint Eastwood. I wanted to be Jeff Bridges. I wanted to be John Wayne, Charles Bronson,” he explains. “I wanted to be solid and know what to say, know how to be in the world.”
He may have been able to recite Robert DeNiro’s lines from “Taxi Driver,” but he never dreamed that he could actually do what they did, that acting could be a professional path or calling.
“I never thought of myself in those terms,” he says. “I come from a completely different place than someone that had an ambition to be an actor.”
His epiphany came in high school, when he auditioned for the school play.
“I was very scared,” he admits. “But I did it. And it was one of the really great things that happened in my life.”
By 1985, he was cast in the short-lived Australian TV series “The Henderson Kids,” which also starred Kylie Minogue. The following year, he joined the Australian soap opera “Neighbours,” the country’s longest-running series (it’s still on today), which subsequently featured a slew of Australian actors (Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Margot Robbie) who would go on to become Hollywood stars. (Like Mendelsohn, Minogue was on the show in its early seasons.) Mendelsohn’s starring role in the 1987 coming-of-age film “The Year My Voice Broke” when he was 17 solidified his star appeal and he worked steadily in Australia for the next 25 years.
Hollywood stardom eluded him, however. And by the time he was in his early 40s he had resigned himself to a career confined to Australia. Then he was cast in director David Michôd’s “Animal Kingdom,” which also starred Pearce and Jacki Weaver, who earned an Oscar nod. It premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, garnering buzz, awards and theatrical releases in America and Europe. Playing the oldest brother of a Melbourne crime family, Mendelsohn manages to be charming and repellent at the same time, a charismatic sociopath who exudes a queasy-inducing volatility.
A succession of dark roles followed; in Kessler’s tropical noir “Bloodline,” and the Boston-set crime drama “Killing Them Softly.” He had a scene-stealing cameo in Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight Rises” and has starred as the likable foil to Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury in various Marvel Cinematic Universe projects, including “Captain Marvel,” “Secret Invasion” and “Spider Man: Far From Home.”
But Mendelsohn has a range deeper than the villain-du-jour. He is darkly funny (as Talos in the Marvel films) and has a keen sense of comic timing (as seen in the 2018 romantic comedy “Untogether,” written and directed by his then-wife, Emma Forrest). Mendelsohn and Forrest, who have a young daughter, divorced in 2016. He also has an older daughter, Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn, from a previous relationship. Wright-Mendelsohn is an actor in Australia.
Given his recent roles as the resident baddie, playing a mild-mannered couturier could be seen by audiences, if not by Mendelsohn, as a significant departure.
“We’re all many people within ourselves,” says Kessler, noting that he first encountered Dior via the designer’s autobiography “Christian Dior and I,” in which Dior writes glancingly about his depression and his struggles to reconcile creative fulfillment with the business imperatives of running a fashion house. “We’re all an introvert and an extrovert. There’s an element of volatility to the extrovert that becomes a coping mechanism, that Ben connected to. But Ben is also able to access that introvert nature of Dior.
“He brings all of himself to his work, without ego,” continues Kessler. “He wants to find a living, breathing experience in order to create a character.”
The 10-episode series — which also stars Juliette Binoche as Coco Chanel — is set against the backdrop of World War II as Dior and his contemporaries including Cristóbal Balenciaga, Pierre Balmain, Jacques Fath and Christian Bérard struggle to keep French fashion from being subsumed amid the dispossession and hardship of Nazi-occupied Paris. (The first three episodes dropped Feb. 14 on AppleTV+ followed by new episodes Wednesdays through April 3.)
“The New Look” begins in 1942, when Dior, after returning to Paris from military service, is at the fashion house of Lucien Lelong (an understated John Malkovich), where he is designing dresses for the wives and girlfriends of Nazi officers and their collaborators in France’s Vichy government, while Chanel, having risen to the pinnacle of French fashion decades earlier, has closed her Paris atelier and moved with her Gestapo spy lover into the Hotel Ritz, the site of opulent Nazi soirees. The episodes unspool on parallel tracks: Chanel’s collusion with the German’s imperils her reputation, and as the war is ending, her freedom; Dior’s struggle to realize his artistic vision is nearly derailed when his younger sister Catherine (Maisie Williams), a member of the French Resistance, is arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany. Chanel is a canny, self-pitying opportunist who is unburdened by the moral implications of her associations. Dior is shattered by his inability to protect his beloved sister.
“I’ve never worked with someone who is so free and in the moment and delivering things that are so real and so visceral,” says Williams. “The two of us really developed a bond. We both felt very strongly about portraying a sibling relationship that felt real; someone that you can scream at the top of your lungs at but know that you still love deeply in your core.
“The thing about Ben is he doesn’t just deliver a good performance,” adds Williams. “He knows how to get other people to deliver good performances.”
In contrast to the spring-loaded menace of his recent spate of screen villains, Mendelsohn’s portrayal of Dior is a study in containment. Hair neatly combed, suit perfectly pressed, he is halting, bordering on submissive. He hovers in doorways, struggling to find words. In his scenes with Williams, after Catherine returns emaciated and terrorized from the camps, anguish radiates from his face, eyes, shoulders, hands.
“Doing this job was so emotional,” says Mendelsohn. “You give everything you have and you’re never actually able to capture the fullness of the person. I take on jobs that I know I can’t succeed in. Failure keeps you searching, questioning how you can make it better. If you’re not failing, you’re not engaged, you’re not serious about the work you’re doing. It’s the mistakes. It’s the f–kups. It’s all the shit that’s not right that allows magic.”
This undercurrent of constant striving may be why Mendelsohn does not like to watch his work; there’s no fixing anything after production wraps.
“I try very hard not to ever watch. It’s just another thing to worry about,” he says.
And Mendelsohn seems to worry about a lot of things. But he has figured out how to channel that interior dialogue of self-doubt into his work. (At one point, toward the end of the interview, he offers ruefully: “The better your working life, the worse your real life. It’s a horrible trade-off.”) But he’s never entirely comfortable with the process.
“It’s a scary job,” he says. “It’s always scary. The moment when I get the job, that’s the best time. And after that, it’s all failure. But it’s about failing appropriately — and delivering. When we were making (‘The New Look’) I was so happy. I was over the moon,” he says. “And I was terrified.”