Paul Benjamin Mendelsohn (born 3 April 1969) is an Australian actor. He first rose to prominence in Australia for his breakout role in The Year My Voice Broke (1987) and since then he has had roles in films such as Animal Kingdom (2010), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Starred Up (2013), Mississippi Grind (2015), Rogue One (2016), Darkest Hour (2017) and Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018). He joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Talos in the superhero film Captain Marvel (2019), reprising the role in Spider-Man: Far From Home (also 2019) and the upcoming Disney series Secret Invasion (2023).

Mendelsohn starred in the Netflix original series Bloodline (2015–2017), for which he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2016. In 2020, Mendelsohn starred in the HBO crime miniseries The Outsider.

Early life and family :

Mendelsohn was born in Melbourne, Victoria, the son of Carole Ann (née Ferguson) and Frederick Arthur Oscar Mendelsohn. His father is a prominent medical researcher who previously headed the Howard Florey Institute in Melbourne, where he maintains the status of Professor Emeritus. Ben and his two brothers, Tom and David, as well as his mother (deceased), a registered nurse, lived in Europe and the United States for long periods of time, and returned to Melbourne when he was in high school. He attended Mercersburg Academy in the U.S. before attending Heidelberg Primary School and Eltham High School and Banyule High (now Viewbank College). He took drama because he thought it was an easy class. Mendelsohn was the only one of his friends to follow up with an audition for Crawford Productions that was being advertised.

In October 2009, he was featured in an episode of the Australian series Who Do You Think You Are?, which traced the ancestry of his paternal grandfather Oscar Mendelsohn, who was from a Jewish family. It also found convicts on his mother's side. Searching for a connection to composer Felix Mendelssohn, which was eventually dismissed, he discovered links to 19th-century Prussia. His paternal ancestors were among the first Prussian Jews to be naturalised in Schneidemühl in the province of Posen, now Piła in modern Poland. He also has Greek, German, and British Isles ancestry.