“That’s never stopped. I’ve never stopped moving for very long. Normal life feels blissful when you have it.”
A blissful life has not been on the cards for Mendelsohn. When he was a toddler, he had a severe reaction to a vaccine and was in hospital for a month. He remembers it vividly.
“They gave me these awfully painful injections that I can remember, in my throat there’s a screaming kind of thing that I would do, where you would scream yourself hoarse and get these terrible headaches. So I remember that …
So what if the TV show Expats did not portray Hong Kong as it likes?
So what if the TV show Expats did not portray Hong Kong as it likes?
“I was a little two-year-old or whatever I was, so I was in a cot waiting for mum and dad to come, and they would come, and then they would go. I think that probably formed me more than anything else. Somewhere around there, I had these [penicillin] injections and it went on for like an eternity to that little chap.”
“I was kicked out because I was just being a young idiot. I was not a good student; things weren’t going well, and they required my withdrawal. I was being a naughty little fellow and you guys have a much better sense of limits than Australia does.
“Then I lived with my grandmother after that, which is where I started acting.” Although that was the beginning of his passion, he recalls, “that was the saddest point in my life at that time”.
“It was an incredibly difficult period because I couldn’t live with either of my parents … I think what they mistook as freedom we thought was giving us an edge. We weren’t well protected.”
At his grandmother’s, he flourished and began performing at school. “To become accepted and liked by a group of people that don’t think much of you means a lot,” he says. “I still get that feeling.”
Casting a skinny Aussie as a chic, sophisticated Frenchman seems a bit odd, but Mendelsohn shrugs it off. “[The executive producer] was upstairs cooking pizza and said he’d read Dior’s biography and was interested in it for a while, and he told me essentially a little bit about Dior.”
“And I said, ‘Well, when do we start?’ I wouldn’t have thought of me, but I think it’s the advantage of having people that know you and can see different aspects of your character that they feel they can bring to life.”
Mendelsohn had worked with The New Look creators before on thriller drama television series Bloodline.
At the beginning of Mendelsohn’s career, he had no trouble bringing characters to life. In fact, he was a sought-after actor in his early twenties. But then the bottom fell out. “I had a very dry period in my thirties,” he recalls.
“It just dwindled to nothing. And I figured, ‘OK, 95 per cent of the people or more that [are] a part of the arts stay for a certain amount of time, and then they move on. You came to that period.’ And I kept telling myself, ‘I’ll give it another two years or whatever.’ And I did one of those and I think I did another one.”
He managed by holding a glossary of jobs. He worked in a slaughterhouse, in a bakery, in nightclubs, as a building labourer and as a dishwasher. “The slaughterhouse was tough,” he muses, “but it was formative.”
Mendelsohn, 54, married, then divorced and is the father of a 10-year-old daughter with his ex. He is also the father of a grown-up daughter from an earlier relationship.
About his younger daughter, he says: “Having her, it made me feel like, ‘OK, I’ve done it. I’ve done the job of life, I’ve done the basic procreation thing.’ But I think it really made me want to be successful in an enduring way. It made me want to build something that would protect her, and I just wanted to be safe and careful.”
He would like to marry again, he confesses reluctantly.
“To me, the greatest risks are still to be met, which is basically how to have a life and a family and do this. At the end of the day, that’s what I really want to do. I just really want to have a family and just be in the world,” says Mendelsohn.
