Cameras were rolling on the set of a Hollywood film when Angus Sampson noticed something odd about his American colleagues. A co-star who had won a best actor Oscar was having his lines fed to him via an earpiece. Another was holding a script just out of shot. A third had a PA holding up cue cards reminding them to do anything as complicated as nodding.

“I remember walking in thinking: ‘do people learn their lines any more?’”

Sampson learns his lines. So far, he’s appeared in 39 films and 34 TV series, and has writing and directing credits to his name as well. He’s played roles in Fargo, The Walking Dead, Underbelly and The Stand, and helped create the hit Insidious franchise, in which he also has a recurring role.

You wouldn’t have predicted it of the highly enthusiastic teen who debuted as co-host on the late 90s morning show Recovery. “I was possibly the worst-dressed individual in the world. I remember having pink hair with a beard manicured like a chin strap, like I was trying to get into Everclear or Smash Mouth.”

Sampson can’t remember the last time he was out of work. With the one obvious exception: at the start of the pandemic, after decades of consistent jobs, he found himself wondering what he could do if the acting thing petered out. “I don’t actually have a skill set. I think I’m nice. I think I’m a nice dinner guest, maybe? I ended up deciding that I could probably be a nice driver, a good driver if people needed a lift.”

It’s unlikely that Sampson will have to don the chauffeur cap any time soon. In coming months he’ll appear in the latest Mad Max film, Furiosa, and a thriller starring Ben Kingsley and Aaron Eckhart. He’ll reprise his long-running roles in much-loved series Bump and The Lincoln Lawyer. He’ll also premiere a new role in Heartbreak High, the Emmy-winning Australian series whose first season was one of the most watched shows on Netflix around the world.

All that work means he’s regularly ping-ponging between Hollywood and his homeland. “This is my fifth winter in a row. Not that California winters or Australian winters are all that disastrous, but I’m looking forward to having a summer sometime. I don’t know when that will be.”

He’s speaking from the Los Angeles home he’s lived in since 2014. It’s in an area of Hollywood that was once an avocado grove, but today is full of Moreton Bay figs, jacarandas and eucalyptuses. “It’s nice to have a bit of domesticity in this unfamiliar rapids of a city. Not that I really hang out with Australians while I’m here. I certainly don’t want to be reminded that I shouldn’t be here, on some level, which is what happens a lot when you hang out with your Australian peers.”

Sampson might avoid Aussies in Hollywood, but he recognises why there are so many. “People here tell me that the reason is that they’re mostly hard workers.” They learn their lines, at least.

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But working so much is a double-edged sword. It means he’s often unavailable for roles he’d love to take on. That was the case with Heartbreak High – his duties on Bump originally ruled him out for a part in the high school drama’s second season. It turned out the two productions shared an office, however, and some backroom negotiations between the shows’ respective producers resulted in rejigged shooting schedules that could accommodate Sampson.

When he was told he could take on the job of Hartley High’s head of PE, Timothy Voss, he didn’t even need to read a script before signing up. He’d been a huge fan of the first season and had only heard good things from fellow actors. He was on set 72 hours later.

Voss is a comic character from the outset, the kind of affable buffoon that Sampson does well, but as the series progresses his character grows more complex. It’s clear he grew up in a very different world to the teens of today. “This world was unfamiliar to me as Angus as well. I felt older for the first time,” says Sampson. “To the point that I had to ask them, ‘What word did you just say?’ Slay. I’m like: ‘Sleigh, as in reindeer?’ No, like a warrior slaying a beast. Wow. OK. I remember asking the girls ... ‘am I allowed to say that?’”

Sampson says that part of the appeal of playing Voss was that “his dinosaur ways were really my own ways in many regards”.

Where some people in Voss’ position resent the fact that youth culture no longer has much of a place for them, Sampson is more accepting of the fact that his Recovery days are long behind him. “Not to get too heavy, but I’m always like, ‘Why would I even do an interview? Why does anyone need to hear from another privileged white middle-aged, self-absorbed person?’”

It’s not just the language of Hartley High’s student cohort that Sampson finds alien. He doesn’t know how his young co-stars find the energy to keep up their social media presences. The closest he came was years ago, when Dave Hughes convinced him to download Twitter.

“He was like: ‘You can talk to your fans.’ I said: ‘I don’t think I’ve got fans.’ He signed me up and later that night I tweeted ‘just taking the dog for a walk’ and someone wrote ‘is that a euphemism?’ and I quickly deleted the app.”

Sampson seems to prefer his low-key public life. He’s in demand enough that he generally doesn’t have to audition for roles, which suits him fine. “Not because I’m too good to audition, but it makes me very anxious. I’ve auditioned for one thing in four years, for Ruben Ostlund, the director of Triangle of Sadness. You say to yourself, ‘Well, it’s worth the agony if he’s asked after me’.”

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When he was starting out, he thought an actor had to be all smiles and positive thinking, up for anything that came their way. “But that’s not me. I’m loath to say yes to anything.”

Things he’s said no to in recent years include Ford vs Ferrari (the script was “a heap of shit, cliched tripe”) and the Will Smith drama Emancipation. He even turned down a role in a Marvel movie because he just couldn’t picture “me as the lead villain in Venom?”

There’s far more freedom on a job like Heartbreak High than on most Hollywood sets, he says. His directors on the latest season “very much gave me permission to say some things that may not have been written in the script, which I was very grateful for. I was making certain things up, trying to solicit some reactions from the cast and I like to do that. If it’s a close-up of my scene partner I like to do something a bit unexpected to change the gear of the scene.”

In each role he plays, you can see that spontaneity on screen – Angus Sampson never phones it in. He also never plays a scene the same way twice. “You want to be in a scene with somebody and be able to forget that there’s 70 people standing in your eyeline,” he says. “To actually try to keep the scene alive, as opposed to there being some cue cards and a person who’s not even really listening to me because there’s a voice in their ear.”

Heartbreak High season two is on Netflix from April 11.