Ben Mendelsohn has virtually grown up before the cameras. The Year My Voice Broke, John Duigan's intelligent but tough edged coming of age story, first brought him to the attention of Australian audiences in 1987, and since then he has dominated the local scene unlike any other actor of his generation. His films include the wonderful The Big Steal for Nadia Tass; he has also appeared opposite Anthony Hopkins in the acclaimed comedy Spotswood, played a leading role in Geoffrey Wright's misunderstood and largely vilified Metal Skin, and was part of the impressive ensemble cast in the recent screen adaptation of Louis Nowra's play Cosi. But unlike many of his contemporaries, who also emerged onto the scene during the resurgence of creative growth in local production in television and film in the late '80's, he is still actively working, which is a little surprising in an industry that is known for its fickleness.

There is a lack of pretension about Mendelsohn as he discusses his brilliant career as one of the finest local actors of his generation. "I've been particularly lucky I would say. More than just a selection of good fortune in the types of things I've been cast in. I've stayed in work throughout most of the lean years, and I'm still around now in this resurgence of interest, originality and creativity that's come about. The death knell has been sounded for the industry many times before, but it just won't lie down."

Having grown up before the cameras doesn't seem to have bothered Mendelsohn, who seems pretty level headed and unassuming about his success in an industry in which many young performers have a tendency to self-destruct under the pressure. "It's part of growing up, and I don't have any personal experiences to compare to it," he confesses. "It's just the way that things seem to have gone. It has its problems, but, by God, it also has its rewards. But, yeah, I've done a lot of growing up in public, as have most of my contemporaries. And really in the '80's there was a crop of young actors starting up, probably more so than at any other time in the history of Australian film and television, particularly tv. There was an enormous amount of young people who started out in the '80's. It's obviously not the sort of thing that can sustain a lot of people. One thing I find you can't do without here is that, almost on every job I walk into, there's someone I've known since my early to mid-teens. That's kind of comfortable. I've been doing it so long now that there's none of this 'Hey, wow! I'm making a movie!' feel. That went away a long time ago. It's just like an office job for me now, one that's a bit weird. There's not that much glamour involved once you get down to it."

"There are some things I turn down, but I like the work more than anything. I like to keep busy. I just like to keep working. It suits me better than fucking around like Kev and Mick, because after a while I come to the same conclusion. Might as well go out and rob a bank or something."

The Kev and Mick he is referring to here are the central protagonists in this dark and down beat new film from writer/director David Caesar, whose last film Greenkeeping failed to get much of a local release. Idiot Box is a deliberately challenging and confronting "in your face" urban drama that further explores that sense of alienation and despair experienced by unemployed and semi-literate adolescents looking for some outlet through which they can express their anger and aggression, a theme common to many Australian films of the past few years. The daily routine of their lives empty of meaning, Kev (Mendelsohn) and his best friend Mick (Jeremy Sims, best known for his role in tv's short-lived sex and sin soapie Chances) decide to rob a local bank. Inspired by the television programs he inevitably watches Kev is the driving force behind the scheme, while Mick, who envisages himself as a sort of street poet, reluctantly goes along merely to keep the boredom of everyday life briefly at bay. Unfortunately these two tyro criminals are on a collision course with a couple of hardened criminals who are also planning to hit the same bank branch on the same day.

The film has a restless energy and tension that enhances the tough-edged narrative, and Mendelsohn says that he was immediately grabbed by the quality of the script. "I like the way David writes his language stuff. More than any other writer in this country David can write the Australian tongue, better than any other writer in this country. I liked it, I thought it was a really true, funny script and it appealed to me." Caesar writes with a finely tuned ear for the street wise vernacular of modern youth, and the film features a blistering array of harsh invective and abrasive dialogue that rings true and perfectly captures the anger, frustration, desperation and disillusionment of the twenty something generation.

Slipping into the character of Kev, the epitome of the volatile loser and angry young man, was also pretty easy for this gifted young actor. "Kev's not that difficult, he's the sort of character you always see around, particularly if you've lived in the suburbs. You see people like Kev around all the time. In a certain respect he's an archetype, the sort of young, angry Australian male with not much to do. He was a bit of fun to play."

Mendelsohn admits that director Caesar gave him plenty of space in which to create the character. "He just let us pretty much run our own race and he'd step in and give a tweak here and a tweak there," he says rather simply. "We did a lot of talking at the beginning about what we thought and what he thought, but he's very much a person to let the actors go. I think it was a case where I was pretty sure of the character I was playing. There were a couple of little touches - like Kev's painted nails - that I just chucked in. And David doesn't believe that the modern actor requires much rehearsal, which is an interesting idea. You get out there and basically just do it. And that has points to it, particularly with the spontaneity and energy and stuff. I often find that too, that the first few times you do something there's a crispness to it, which you can never capture."

There are a number of thematic similarities between this disconcerting and savagely funny black comedy and Geoffrey Wright's misunderstood and largely vilified Metal Skin. Both films are set in the tough, western suburbs, and they present a rather grim and uncomfortably bleak view of disenchanted and alienated youth. However, Mendelsohn admits that the similarity in themes is something he doesn't think about too much. "It's funny, but I tend to ignore themes in the stuff that I tend to do," he explains. "I think there's a tendency to gild the lily in terms of performance. It's very easy for an actor to fuck up a film by becoming too involved in what you're doing, by reacting, or making too big a point of what you're doing. In a funny sort of way, film would be better off without actors because you could actually film the situations that you wanted and you would actually get that reality and spontaneity that would far surpass anything that actors could make up. The best way is to get out of the way of the themes, out of the way of everything else, and just concentrate on the character and the situation."

Since finishing work on Idiot Box Mendelsohn has done a couple of television dramas, a monologue for the ABC, and appeared with Noah Taylor in True Love And Chaos, the new film from producer Stavros Adonis Efthymiou, who is currently riding high on the success of his winning low budget feature Love And Other Catastrophes.

Having appeared in a number of films and worked with some of the cream of our local directors, does Mendelsohn have aspirations to direct a feature film himself at some stage? "Aspirations are something a bit better acted on than talked about," he says.

© 1996-97 Greg King / Used With Permission