Ben Mendelsohn on Rogue One, Playing the Villain and Wearing a Cape

Ben Mendelsohn, the Emmy-winning Australian actor for Bloodline, 47, stars as the Empire’s villainous Orson Krennic in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, in theaters Dec. 16. Krennic springs into action when a group of unlikely heroes—the Rebellion—bands together to steal the plans for the Empire’s ultimate weapon of destruction, the Death Star, in this prequel set before the events of the original Star Wars (1977).

Were you a Star Wars fan as a kid?

Oh, yeah! I saw it in the cinema when it came out. I was instantly and totally in love with, and caught up in, that whole world. I have great respect for its power. It’s something I revere.

How is Orson Krennic different from other Star Wars villains?

He’s more of an up-through-the-ranks guy. He wasn’t born into the upper echelons of the Empire, which seems to be the feeling you get of quite a few of the Imperials. He’s come up through army intelligence to head up the most important projects that they have. He’s very much a true believer in force, not in the Force.

Krennic’s career is staked on the success of the Death Star, right?

Yeah, very much. The thing is, it’s a very tempting bit of hardware for whoever is controlling it. He’s got to fight some rear-guard actions and deal with enemies, foreign and domestic, as it were. He’s very good at getting this thing done. The thing with the Empire is there is a lot of internal jockeying for position. He’s been pretty good at that, but the prize that he has created [the Death Star] is pretty significant.

You get to wear a cape. Does putting that on affect your performance?

I’d like to think it does. There’s a certain school of acting that feels that you really don’t know exactly who you are until you put those clothes on, whatever they [may] be. I think in the case of Krennic, that’s doubly so. What a thing to have largely given up in dress, the cape. Boy, it does a lot. It’s a very effective piece; it’s brilliant costuming.

As a fan of the Star Wars franchise, what was it like to become part of the family in Rogue One?

A great honor. Very giddily exciting, nervous, but also very much wanting to get in there and try and contribute from both of those perspectives: From as an adult, to the grown up performer, and very much the kid that I was and who still is.

Did you have any geek-out moments while filming? 

I had plenty. The first severe geek-out moment that I had was in one of the Imperial locations. The officers that you’ll see working on computers used a type of graphics that looked beautiful and incredibly faithful to the time when Star Wars came out. That really got me.

Rogue One is a standalone film. How is it different than the other Star Wars movies?

I think that when you have seen the film, it’s different from just about any film at any time. But in terms of the tone palate, it’s a tougher film in a lot of ways. It’s grittier, more of a battle film. I have to thread this needle quite carefully. That’s what I can say without, hopefully, giving the game away. I think in a lot of ways, its greatest strength is the faithfulness it has to the original. It’s very, very faithful to the canon at large, but in particular, it’s very faithful to the original.

Do you like doing a TV series such as Bloodline, where you have more time to dig into a character?

If it works out, it’s fantastic. The thing with television is it’s not “just television” anymore. TV’s been really extraordinary for a good decade or more now. For a guy who’s done a majority of Australian films, the audience is just staggeringly larger.

You’ve done a lot of different accents. Do you consider yourself a master at it?

Not at all—you really have to work at it. I’ve done it out of necessity because I was trying to come and work in the U.S. for a very, very long time before it happened, and the only really effective way was to try and talk in an American accent.

You’re not a fan of watching your own movies? 

Well, no. I stopped watching them a very, very long time ago. You’re doing a scene, and within those scenes, you’re doing various shots. I will quite happily keep shooting the same shot all day. I keep working on them. Even with jobs I don’t get, I still tinker around with them in my mind. If I see them, then I just continue to sort of think about I could have done this, or I could have done that. I don’t rest. Not seeing them was a way of being able to put them to bed and clear the slate for the next thing more than it was anything else. I think it helped.

Also, it’s only recently in the history of acting that you could watch yourself. If you’re doing a play, you never watch yourself but you know damn well when something’s working well or not. You can feel it from the audience and you can feel it in the scene. So it just got borne out by that.

We’re used to seeing our bad guys in black, but this is the guy who’s considered the villain of the film and he’s wearing white. 

In those terms, yeah, indeed. There’s something of a flip going on there, if you like.

Here in the U.S. you play villains, but back home you’re more seen as a hero.

I’m not quite sure that it’s that neat. I’ve been doing this for a very long time and I’ve played a lot of different roles in terms of the villain and the good guy, as it were. I don’t think it’s any mistake that the thing that really started to gather people’s attention here in the U.S. was Animal Kingdom. That guy is a very bad guy. You really become aware of the whole bad guy, good guy stuff more from, I guess, the way that people commentate or look at it. That’s significant but it’s not particularly the way I, or actors, look at it. We more just try and do the things correctly.

Before Animal Kingdom, there was a point in your career when you went a couple of years without landing a role. Did you actually seriously think you were going to do something else?

Very much so. There was a period of a few years where absolutely nothing happened. I thought, “Well, I’ve had a pretty good run.” I’d had a period in my life where I’d worked a lot. I thought that was probably more or less it. I was not planning on sitting around living a dream in my head. That didn’t seem to be a very good way to be leading the rest of my life. So I’d also given myself a couple of time limits and if nothing happened, then I’d forget it.

I did that a couple of times. I had a big period of work in Australia, which ended with Animal Kingdom. Then that came out over here. Still it was pretty quiet for quite a while. Then things just started to pick up. I got a couple of one-two punches, as it were. After Animal Kingdom, there was The Dark Knight Rises and then The Place Beyond the Pines. Then there was Killing Them Softly.

What’s next for you?

I shot Ready Player One for Steven Spielberg in the latter half of this year. I’m shooting something right now here in L.A. Then I will go to England and shoot something else there. Then I might take a few weeks off.