Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn has won a best supporting actor award at the Emmys in Hollywood.

Mendelsohn won for his role as Danny Rayburn on the Netflix series Bloodline, beating out Kit Harrington and Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones), Michael Kelly (House of Cards), Jon Voight (Ray Donovan) and Jonathan Banks (Better Caul Saul).

Meanwhile, Game of Thrones has become the most awarded narrative series of all time, dominating the list of winners from this year's awards.

Mendelsohn was also nominated in the same category at last year's Emmys, but lost to Dinklage, and also received a Golden Globe nomination for the role earlier this year.

He was not present at the Emmys ceremony to collect his award, but his father Fred said his son was "delighted".

He told 774 ABC Melbourne that he knew his son was an outstanding actor but did not expect him to take out the award.

"I thought last year he was a serious candidate, but I think he and the rest of us thought that the game was so stacked this year that he may not make it, so it was a double thrill," he said.

"A lot of people have recognised the depth and quality of his acting, and that is relatively recent in the United States, mainly because he's been making more films there and he's really becoming known.

"Before that, the general American public didn't know him."

Acting roots in A Country Practice, Neighbours

Mendelsohn began his acting career on Australian TV series including The Henderson Kids, A Country Practice and Neighbours in the 1980s, before a breakout film role in The Year My Voice Broke.

But it was his turn in Animal Kingdom in 2010 that propelled him, and co-stars Joel Edgerton and Jacki Weaver, into the spotlight in Hollywood.

Fred Mendelsohn, a scientist at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience, said his son's acting career began when he took drama at school.

"I wanted him to be a scientist like me and I told him all about scientists, but at about 13 he went in the school play and did every well in that," he said.

"There's a story, I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but he really impressed the drama teacher when he put the play on himself playing each character, but that's the sort of thing he'd do."

He said he would sometimes "almost forget" Mendelsohn was his son, when watching him on screen.

"He takes on these characters, he lives them and then drops them and gets on with the next job," he said.

Mendelsohn will appear in Star Wars franchise film Rogue One later this year and is due in Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One in 2018.

Netflix announced last week that Bloodline would end after the upcoming third season.