There's only one Australian up for an acting Emmy today. But he's a good one.

Straight to the pool room for Ben, we hope.

Ben Mendelsohn is every man I dated in my 20s. But I won’t hold that against him.

If you are a straight woman of a certain age, it’s likely he’s every man you dated in your 20s, too.

The ones who were intensely charismatic but tantalisingly unavailable. The ones who you were desperate to save, but who were utterly without need of you. The ones who were always, ultimately, more interested in their band, their degenerate friends, their terrible poetry, their ex, or their drug habit, than in curling up on your couch and watching The Secret Life Of Us.

Of course, Ben Mendelsohn wouldn’t be able to do that, anyway, because he was IN The Secret Life Of Us.

Ben Mendelsohn was in every TV show that you were ever obsessed with, back when TV was something you watched in neat weekly installments, with friends rather than with Twitter.

He was in Love My Way. He was in Tangle. If there was an Australian show stamped QUALITY, Mendelsohn was in it. But only for a little while. Because, like that boyfriend of yours, he was only crashing at your place for a while before he was moving on to the next thing.

For better or worse, I grew out of those men. But watching Ben Mendelsohn in Bloodline, the almost perfect Netflix drama for which he should be winning an Emmy today, makes me want to look them all up on Facebook and see if they have ended up as crumpled and world-weary and nihilistic as the supremely damaged Danny Rayburn, the character who simmers in every scene of the pitch-black family drama, as incongruous in the tropical paradise setting as a used band-aid floating in the crystaline shallows.

The Emmy nod is only a part of it. Hollywood is having A Thing with Mendelsohn. It all started in earnest with Animal Kingdom. If you haven’t seen David Michod’s 2010 movie, get on that, sharpish. It is genuinely terrifying, and mostly because Mendelsohn’s character – despite being drug-addled, as many of them are – seems capable of absolutely anything. A suburban psychopath in a faded Hawaiian shirt.

If you have seen it, this picture will make you anxious:

Of course, that performance was no revelation to Australian audiences. By the time Hollywood agents were raving about his authenticity, Mendelsohn had already been working for more than 20 years.

But he has told interviewers that before the fuss about Kingdom, he was considering alternative ways to earn a living.

Now, not so much. In the last four years, Mendelsohn has been in films of quality with, yes, Pitt. With Christian Bale. And with Ryans Gosling and Reynolds. He has been photographed wearing ridiculous clothes on red carpets, and he has married the excellent writer Emma Forrest at the Chateau Marmont. It doesn’t get much more Hollywood Insider than that.

He appeared in Girls – just for a moment, of course – as messed-up Jessa’s messed-up dad. He was in a Batman movie. He’s going to be in the new Star Wars, FFS.

Hollywood appears to have decided that among hordes of shredded, oddly sanitised “bad boys”, you can’t buy or fake the kind of life experience that rises like steam from Mendlsohn’s every understated move.

But in this, in Bloodline, he is so entirely perfect, it doesn’t even matter if he does what no-one thinks he will do, sell his battered Australian soul to a blockbuster franchise. As the blackest of all the off-white sheep of the wealthy, resort-owning Florida Keys Rayburns, Mendelsohn plays a man at war with his family, his past and himself with an understated menace that makes every frame uncomfortable to watch, but impossible not to.

It’s the story of what happens to a family when they are brought back together by a crisis and are forced to face the things they have been brushing under the tropical raffia rug of the family business for decades. As in much of the best television, there’s sex, drugs, violence and twists. And as in much of the best television, it’s almost impossible to pick sides.

Friday Night Lights‘ “Coach”. Kyle Chandler also in the running for an Emmy for Bloodline. He is nominated for Lead Actor, while Mendelsohn is up for Supporting. It’s tempting, and a testament to the Australian’s immaculate performance, to think that those tags should be swapped. When “Danny” is on screen, no-one is looking at anyone else.

So, in misty-eyed tribute to all the 1990s wasters who messed with our hearts, I will be thoroughly rooting for the absurdly talented Mendelsohn in today’s Emmys ceremony.

He’s not a man who gives the impression of giving much truck to awards and accolades, but it must feel good to be there, a 46-year-old in a sharp-arsed suit among the acres of tulle and flesh and flashes, thinking, “I’ve been here along. Where the fuck have you lot been?”

Have you been watching Bloodline?