The briny stink of sleaze and fish guts upon him, Ben Mendelsohn entered streaming America’s consciousness this year in the debut season of Bloodline, the Netflix series by Glenn Kessler, Todd A. Kessler, and Daniel Zelman, the team behind Damages. As Danny Rayburn, the wayward, grudge-bearing eldest child in a family that runs a resort in the Florida Keys, Mendelsohn simultaneously exuded charisma and menace, evoking Gary Oldman and Peter Coyote at their most mischievous, yet possessed of his own distinctive scary-man juju. The 46-year-old actor has been a known and respected quantity in his native Australia since the 1980s, when he co-starred in the coming-of-age movie The Year My Voice Broke and the enduring soap opera and national institution Neighbours (back when Kylie Minogue was on it!).

Even before Bloodline, Mendelsohn was enjoying something of a midlife breakthrough, playing various shades of unsavory in Animal Kingdom, The Dark Knight Rises, and *The Place Beyond the Pines—*and, for comic relief, guesting as the flake-ola father of Jemima Kirke’s character in Girls. His streak of prestige work continues with Mississippi Grind, in theaters this month, an Altman-esque road movie directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck in which he stars opposite Ryan Reynolds, and—in a coup for a Star Wars fan who was eight when the original film came out—in next year’s Rogue One, the first in Disney’s new line of spin-off Star Wars movies that will exist apart from the main Lucasfilm franchise. Herewith, some insights gleaned from a benign, wholly unfrightening conversation with Mendelsohn.

HE WAS a sort of Australian analogue to Anthony Michael Hall and Matthew Broderick in the late 1980s and early 90s, among his juvenile hits a movie called The Big Steal, in which he tried to impress a pretty girl by commandeering a Jaguar XJ6.

HE PRONOUNCED the name of the vehicle “Jehg-yoo-wah.”

HE DOES not have a default American accent but, rather, works with the dialect coach Thom Jones (who is also a professor of theater arts at Brown University) to tailor his speech patterns to his part. He is especially proud of the Schenectady accent he mastered for The Place Beyond the Pines.

HE IS the eldest of three brothers, with two further half-brothers from his father’s second marriage. His father, Frederick Mendelsohn, is a highly regarded medical-research scientist in Melbourne who was, for many years, the director of that city’s Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health.