It would be excellent to do a 'Star Wars.'

$3,000 from a residual cheque was all I made one year.

Fifteen years old, out in the world, acting was all I had.

I think Kyle Chandler is something of a national treasure.

I grew up loving the John Wayne and Clint Eastwood westerns.

If you ride like lightning, you're gonna crash like thunder.

I've been a Ryan Reynolds fan since the first time I saw him.

'Animal Kingdom' is a lot of things, but it's not heartwarming.

I think there's a lot of mythos about what's required in acting.

If you're a 'character actor,' you get hired to play baddies a lot.

Life is a lot sweeter, I think, than you can be aware of it at times.

I don't know that it exists, the perfect family. It's always complicated.

I like to call up ghosts of things past for myself when I'm working a lot.

People don't know who I am, and that's not a bad thing at all from my end.

Before 'Animal Kingdom,' I wasn't particularly thought of in villainous roles.

For me it's a compliment, playing baddie characters. I take it as a compliment.

It's good to surf whatever waves are going on right there as they're happening.

Acting is a bit of a heart and soul exercise with me. It's kind of all I've got.

As an outsider in America, you do see the kind of hypocrisy that's rampant there.

From my point of view, things don't have to change to get better. Things are fantastic.

Crewing and being on film sets is kind of like being in the carnival, with carnie folks.

'The Outlaw Josey Wales' is one I watched again and again and again in the early days of VHS.

I came from the outer suburbs of Melbourne, so you do learn how to survive in that environment.

'Star Wars' is populated by so many great types; who wouldn't want to be a Han Solo kind of dude?

I don't believe in the transformation myth, where if you have more success, life changes for you.

If you're going to be a father and whatnot, yeah, you better be responsible about it as best you can.

One of my earlier films is 'Quigley Down Under.' That was early on in my career, and that was horsey.

I think difficult characters are very rewarding to do. They often have facets to them and this and that.

Let me give you a little Mendelsohn 101: I came up in television in the early- to mid- 1980s in Australia.

There's very little different between the way the government operates in America and the way criminals do.

You can certainly extend your adolescence. There's people that are very good at extending it indefinitely.

For mine, the villains of the piece were always important. In a traditional sense, that's always an important role.

I think I've benefited from not being hugely known. It means I have to do something really effective to be noticed.

Typically, I'll wake up at 4:30 in the morning. It's just the continual jet lag residue, just weird sleeping hours.

In Australia, even the darkest subject matter has a little pinch of humor. A little sweet to make the sour go down.

I've spent various periods of my career being thought of as various things, various degrees of substance and ideas.

I don't have memorabilia but try to take a bit of wardrobe, usually because they dress me better than I dress myself.

I think that story wins out over acting and that the thing as a whole is more important than the performances therein.

I generally feel like people that are doing the wardrobe know more about wardrobe than I do, and they have an overview.

'Slow West' is a western, and it's sort of a twist on the genre stylistically, I think, from what I understand going in.

The people that impress me are Bob Dylan. The ones who keep working, year in and year out, and keep coming up with stuff.

I suspect, for a lot of people who become actors, there's a feeling of wanting to be someone other than who they actually are.

'Animal Kingdom' is a significant comet, and it's cast a tail. It's very hard to see anything post that happening without that.

At any period of an actor's life, it's fairly likely that they'll be cast in ways that are reminiscent. That's the way it goes.

I'm very well known in the industry and relatively well known by people who are aficionados and what not, but outside of that - no.

Accents are always difficult in their way, but as long as you're not throwing an audience off with it, then that's all it should be.

I basically sat around unemployed in Sydney for three years straight, and the two things that saved me were the rugby league and my dog.

My favorite-ever version of 'King Lear' is the 1971 film by Peter Brooks. He has this enormous fur thing, and it adds enormous gravitas.

There are two things: 1) what things one does in the world, and 2) what family one has. There's the two really tangible things that can stay.

Most young actors, that's all they're trying to do: Get better at acting and be able to keep doing it. And that doesn't work out for most people.

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