When Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn was a kid, his family was constantly on the move. All that uprooting reverberated his whole life. The performer in shows like “Bloodline,” "Captain Marvel,” "Animal Kingdom” and the latest, “The New Look,” says he became hopelessly shy because of it.

“You have to learn how to fit in, and because I went to a couple of different countries, I had that shock of, ‘Oh, my, HOW do we do it?’ Because it felt like survival back then. It really feels terrifying. Everyone’s thrown together ... and I do feel perennially like I’ve got to move on. That’s never stopped. I’ve never stopped moving for very long. Normal life feels blissful when you have it.”

A blissful life hasn’t been in the cards for Mendelsohn. When he was a toddler, he suffered a severe reaction to a vaccine and was hospitalized for a month. He remembers it vividly: “They gave me these awfully painful injections that I can remember. In my throat, there’s a screaming kind of thing that I would do where you would scream yourself hoarse and get these terrible headaches. So I remember that ...

“I was a little 2-year-old or whatever I was, so I was in a cot waiting for mom and dad to come, and they would come, and then they would go. I think that probably formed me more than anything else. Somewhere around there, I had these (Penicillin) injections, and it went on to like an eternity to that little chap.”

Life didn’t get much better after that. Though he won't reveal too much, he does admit that his childhood was erratic. He was sent to boarding school in the states. “Six or nine months at the boarding school, I got kicked out — which is one of the best things that ever happened to me,” he says.

“I was kicked out because I was just being a young idiot. I was not a good student; things weren’t going well, and they required my withdrawal. I was being a naughty little fellow, and you guys have a much better sense of limits than Australia does. Then I lived with my grandmother after that, which is where I started acting.”

Though that was the beginning of his passion, he recalls, “That was the saddest point in my life at that time. It was an incredibly difficult period because I couldn’t live with either of my parents because they couldn’t deal. As a kid, we were that kind of moment of time in thinking where it was very unbounded. I think what they mistook as freedom we thought was giving us an edge. We weren’t well protected.”

At his grandmother’s, he flourished and began performing at school. “To become accepted and liked by a group of people that don’t think much of you means a lot,” he says. “I still get that feeling.”

That feeling pursues him in the dizzying variety of roles he’s played. In “The New Look,” now on Apple TV+, Mendelsohn plays the world-famous French couturier Christian Dior.

Casting a skinny Aussie as a chic and sophisticated Frenchman seems a bit odd, but Mendelsohn shrugs it off. “(The executive producer) was upstairs cooking pizza and said he’d read Dior’s biography and was interested in it for a while, and he told me essentially a little bit about Dior.

“And I said, ‘Well, when do we start?’ I wouldn’t have thought of me, but I think it’s the advantage of having people that know you and can see different aspects of your character that they feel they can bring to life.” Mendelsohn had worked with “The New Look” creators before on “Bloodline.”

At the beginning of Mendelsohn’s career, he had had no trouble bringing characters to life. In fact, he was a sought-after celeb in his early 20s. But then the bottom fell out. “I had a very dry period in my 30s,” he recalls.

“It just dwindled to nothing. And I figured, ‘OK, 95% of the people or more that have a part of the arts and stay for a certain amount of time, and then they move on. You came to that period.’ And I kept telling myself, ‘I’ll give it another two years or whatever.’ And I did one of those, and I think it I did another one.”

He managed by holding a glossary of jobs. He worked in a slaughter house, in a bakery, in nightclubs, as a building laborer and as a dishwasher. “The slaughter house was tough,” he muses, “but it was formative.”

Mendelsohn, 54, married and divorced and is the father of a 10-year-old daughter with his ex. He’s also the dad of a grown daughter from an earlier relationship.

About his younger daughter, he says, “Having her, it made me feel like, ‘OK, I’ve done it. I’ve done the job of life, I’ve done the basic procreation thing.’ But I think it really made me want to be successful in an enduring way. It made me want to build something that would protect her, and I just wanted to be safe and careful,” he says.

He would like to marry again, he confesses reluctantly. “To me, the greatest risks are still to be met, which is basically how to have a life and a family and do this. At the end of the day, that’s what I really want to do. I just really want to have a family and just be in the world.”