Ben Mendelsohn Stars as Christian Dior in Apple’s ‘The New Look’

Ben Mendelsohn falls in love simply.

“If I play somebody who truly lived, I can not assist falling in love with him,” says the actor, showing on Zoom from his dwelling in Los Angeles to speak about his flip as Christian Dior in Todd A. Kessler’s “The New Look.”

“I like Rupert Murdoch as a result of I performed him,” he gives. He performed a a lot youthful (circa late Fifties), pre-Fox Information model of the media baron within the 2002 Australian movie “Black and White.”

However it’s clear that Mendelsohn’s attachment to Dior — a revered, virtually saintly, determine within the annals of style as a lot for his perfectionist adherence to craft and type as for his unbending devotion to the French ethos of fraternité — runs a lot deeper.

“Christian is among the most lovely folks that I’ve ever, ever encountered in a conceptual framework,” says Mendelsohn, leaning ahead in his chair. “He was a person that skilled monumental quantities of emotions. He was ravaged in a very explicit method. And but he glides up by it and he simply takes over the world. He’s simply a unprecedented man. Wow, I simply adore it. I adore it a lot.”

He was drawn to Dior’s ardour (he launched his style home in 1946, amid the postwar devastation and destruction of the French economic system) and his resiliency within the face of failures.

“We fantasize a lot about what success is, what it’s important to do [to get it]. And it’s virtually at all times utter f–king crap. One of the best individuals are fully stunning; they’re curious and enlivened by the engagement that they’ve with the world,” says Mendelsohn. “You will be fragile and you can also make errors and nonetheless hold placing one foot in entrance of the opposite and go on and do wonderful issues.”

Sporting a crisp white gown shirt, unbuttoned on the neck and wrists, his salt-and-pepper hair in an upswept widow’s peak, Mendelsohn, 54, exudes a kinetic, stressed vitality. He chugs from a bottle of chocolate milk, spoons vanilla ice cream into his mouth, lights a cigarette, after which one other. Alternately profane and impassioned, he speaks not simply along with his face, however his total physique, his arms and palms are in a perpetual state of gesticulation. Greater than as soon as, waves of emotion carry him to tears.

He admits that he knew “nothing” about Christian Dior, the person, although he did have a passing consciousness of the French luxurious model starting within the late Nineteen Nineties-early 2000s, throughout John Galliano’s audacious and controversial stewardship. And whereas he’s principally a denims and T-shirt type of man, he does admit to occasional flights of experimentation.

“I’ve received rings and necklaces which can be outrageously bling,” he says. “And I’ve this jacket…”  He trails off after which asks: “Do you need to go on a little bit stroll? I’ve to indicate you this jacket.”

Laptop computer in hand, he’s now bounding by the home. He’s within the means of shifting, and plenty of of his belongings are already packed.

“It’s the costliest, great, loopy factor I’ve ever purchased,” he says excitedly, rummaging by bins, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He begins to sing — to the tune of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” — “Howdy Dior, my outdated pal…you’re the most superior jacket ever…”

“There you’re child!” he exclaims, as he slips right into a blue merino shearling coat from the Dior Males’s fall 2021 assortment. He purchased it in London for 7,000 kilos, simply earlier than “The New Look” started taking pictures in Paris in 2022.

“That is the most effective f–king jacket ever,” he says, turning towards the digicam and calmly caressing a sleeve. “And I can virtually by no means put on it. That’s the issue with nice garments — you’ve received to rise to them. And also you by no means fairly do.”

He additionally fashions a Fifties Mao-era navy coat that he picked up in China greater than 20 years in the past and a extremely coveted fishtail parka by Raf Simons. He discovered concerning the Belgian designer (and onetime Dior girls’s inventive director) whereas listening to an interview with Virgil Abloh, who was an obsessive Simons collector.

“I had a girlfriend who informed me, ‘Hey, you put on the garments, the garments by no means put on you,’” he says. “And I’ve began to get a bit extra snug with that. However you understand, I’m a bit shy.”

One in every of three boys born to a medical researcher father and nurse mom, Mendelsohn spent years dwelling overseas in Europe and America, care of his father’s profession. His peripatetic childhood seeded in him an adaptable emotional intelligence that may show helpful as an actor. However he was additionally lonely and alienated.

“I grew up with tv,” he says. “It was so essential. It was my pal.”  

The household was prosperous, however his father was cerebral and distant and so Mendelson and his two brothers largely fended for themselves within the psychological jungle of adolescent boyhood. The swagger and confidence of male motion heroes made an impression, and offered emotional scaffolding.

“I wished to be James Bond. I wished to be Clint Eastwood. I wished to be Jeff Bridges. I wished to be John Wayne, Charles Bronson,” he explains. “I wished to be stable and know what to say, know how one can be on the planet.”

He could have been in a position to recite Robert DeNiro’s strains from “Taxi Driver,” however he by no means dreamed that he may truly do what they did, that appearing may very well be knowledgeable path or calling.

“I by no means considered myself in these phrases,” he says. “I come from a totally completely different place than somebody that had an ambition to be an actor.”

His epiphany got here in highschool, when he auditioned for the varsity play.

“I used to be very scared,” he admits. “However I did it. And it was one of many actually nice issues that occurred in my life.”

By 1985, he was forged within the short-lived Australian TV sequence “The Henderson Children,” which additionally starred Kylie Minogue. The next yr, he joined the Australian cleaning soap opera “Neighbours,” the nation’s longest-running sequence (it’s nonetheless on at present), which subsequently featured a slew of Australian actors (Russell Crowe, Man Pearce, Margot Robbie) who would go on to grow to be Hollywood stars. (Like Mendelsohn, Minogue was on the present in its early seasons.) Mendelsohn’s starring position within the 1987 coming-of-age movie “The Yr My Voice Broke” when he was 17 solidified his star enchantment and he labored steadily in Australia for the following 25 years.

Hollywood stardom eluded him, nonetheless. And by the point he was in his early 40s he had resigned himself to a profession confined to Australia. Then he was forged in director David Michôd’s “Animal Kingdom,” which additionally starred Pearce and Jacki Weaver, who earned an Oscar nod. It premiered on the 2010 Sundance Movie Competition, garnering buzz, awards and theatrical releases in America and Europe. Taking part in the oldest brother of a Melbourne crime household, Mendelsohn manages to be charming and repellent on the identical time, a charismatic sociopath who exudes a queasy-inducing volatility.

A succession of darkish roles adopted; 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 “Darkish Knight Rises” and has starred because the likable foil to Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury in varied Marvel Cinematic Universe tasks, together with “Captain Marvel,” “Secret Invasion” and “Spider Man: Far From House.”

However Mendelsohn has a spread deeper than the villain-du-jour. He’s darkly humorous (as Talos within the Marvel movies) and has a eager sense of comedian timing (as seen within the 2018 romantic comedy “Untogether,” written and directed by his then-wife, Emma Forrest). Mendelsohn and Forrest, who’ve a younger daughter, divorced in 2016. He additionally has an older daughter, Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn, from a earlier relationship. Wright-Mendelsohn is an actor in Australia.

Given his current roles because the resident baddie, enjoying a mild-mannered couturier may very well be seen by audiences, if not by Mendelsohn, as a big departure.

“We’re all many individuals inside ourselves,” says Kessler, noting that he first encountered Dior by way of the designer’s autobiography “Christian Dior and I,” wherein Dior writes glancingly about his melancholy and his struggles to reconcile inventive success with the enterprise imperatives of operating a style home. “We’re all an introvert and an extrovert. There’s a component of volatility to the extrovert that turns into a coping mechanism, that Ben linked to. However Ben can be in a position to entry that introvert nature of Dior.

“He brings all of himself to his work, with out ego,” continues Kessler. “He needs to discover a dwelling, respiration expertise with a purpose to create a personality.”

The ten-episode sequence — which additionally stars Juliette Binoche as Coco Chanel — is about in opposition to the backdrop of World Warfare II as Dior and his contemporaries together with Cristóbal Balenciaga, Pierre Balmain, Jacques Fath and Christian Bérard battle to maintain French style from being subsumed amid the dispossession and hardship of Nazi-occupied Paris. (The primary three episodes dropped Feb. 14 on AppleTV+ adopted by new episodes Wednesdays by April 3.)

“The New Look” begins in 1942, when Dior, after returning to Paris from navy service, is on the style home of Lucien Lelong (an understated John Malkovich), the place he’s designing clothes for the wives and girlfriends of Nazi officers and their collaborators in France’s Vichy authorities, whereas Chanel, having risen to the top of French style a long time earlier, has closed her Paris atelier and moved together with her Gestapo spy lover into the Resort Ritz, the location of opulent Nazi soirees. The episodes unspool on parallel tracks: Chanel’s collusion with the German’s imperils her status, and because the battle is ending, her freedom; Dior’s battle to appreciate his creative imaginative and prescient is almost derailed when his youthful sister Catherine (Maisie Williams), a member of the French Resistance, is arrested by the Gestapo and despatched to the Ravensbrück focus camp in northern Germany. Chanel is a canny, self-pitying opportunist who’s unburdened by the ethical implications of her associations. Dior is shattered by his incapacity to guard his beloved sister.

“I’ve by no means labored with somebody who’s so free and within the second and delivering issues which can be so actual and so visceral,” says Williams. “The 2 of us actually developed a bond. We each felt very strongly about portraying a sibling relationship that felt actual; somebody you could scream on the prime of your lungs at however know that you simply nonetheless love deeply in your core.

“The factor about Ben is he doesn’t simply ship a great efficiency,” provides Williams. “He is aware of how one can get different folks to ship good performances.”  

In distinction to the spring-loaded menace of his current spate of display screen villains, Mendelsohn’s portrayal of Dior is a research in containment. Hair neatly combed, swimsuit completely pressed, he’s halting, bordering on submissive. He hovers in doorways, struggling to search out phrases. In his scenes with Williams, after Catherine returns emaciated and terrorized from the camps, anguish radiates from his face, eyes, shoulders, palms.

“Doing this job was so emotional,” says Mendelsohn. “You give every thing you might have and also you’re by no means truly in a position to seize the fullness of the individual. I tackle jobs that I do know I can’t reach. Failure retains you looking, questioning how one can make it higher. If you happen to’re not failing, you’re not engaged, you’re not critical concerning the work you’re doing. It’s the errors. It’s the f–kups. It’s all of the shit that’s not proper that enables magic.”

This undercurrent of fixed striving could also be why Mendelsohn doesn’t like to look at his work; there’s no fixing something after manufacturing wraps.

“I attempt very arduous to not ever watch. It’s simply one other factor to fret about,” he says.

And Mendelsohn appears to fret about a variety of issues. However he has discovered how one can channel that inside dialogue of self-doubt into his work. (At one level, towards the top of the interview, he gives ruefully: “The higher your working life, the more severe your actual life. It’s a horrible trade-off.”) However he’s by no means fully snug with the method.

“It’s a scary job,” he says. “It’s at all times scary. The second after I get the job, that’s the most effective time. And after that, it’s all failure. However it’s about failing appropriately — and delivering. Once we had been making (‘The New Look’) I used to be so completely happy. I used to be over the moon,” he says. “And I used to be terrified.”