Ray of Light

In doing research, so to speak, for my THRILLERS ONLY 2024 movie preview, I was looking into a thriller that failed to make the cut, “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” starring Daisy Ridley and Ben Mendelsohn. As I have noted before, in a profession generally marked by vanity, few modern actors are as willing to let themselves look like complete shit as Ben Mendelsohn. When they needed someone to be covered in grease and filth opposite Ryan Gosling in “The Place Beyond the Pines,” there was only one man for the job. But in consulting Mendelsohn’s bio, I realized that one of the Melbourne native’s earliest roles was on the Australian TV series “The Henderson Kids” opposite another Melbourne native this blog has mentioned once or twice or two thousand times, Kylie Minogue. And that discovery led me to an even greater discovery. This:

Where do we even go from here? Do we dream of an alternate universe where Ben Mendelsohn is more in the Ryan Gosling mode, one where he and Kylie became, like, the Down Under Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? Or do we imagine what life looks like on Earth 2, where Mendelsohn became an international heartthrob and Kylie became a character actor so that the other Kylie, the phony American one, can’t remember her name, could finally trademark the name Kylie in peace? Or do we just let it be, this image, one glorious chance, as the Princess of Pop herself might say, to step back in time.