Eric Bana didn’t have to look far to understand Kyle Turner, the National Parks Service special agent he plays in Netflix’s new murder mystery series “Untamed.”

“There’s a kind of rogue element to him,” Bana, 56, began in a Zoom interview. “He’s someone who was brought up on the land and knows it. Loves it, respects it, traverses it by way of his horse. Thanks to that notion, yeah, he may do unconventional things to go about his job.”

Unlike many roles, “There’s a very unique set of circumstances here to my playing Kyle — because I read the first episode back in 2019. So, I’d been living with Kyle for five years before I hopped on his horse, so to speak.”

That gave Bana an innate understanding of a man whose life has been marked by tragedy, a divorce and his job.

“I really felt like I knew him very well. I’d been in constant contact with our writers to work closely together, developing the show. So, by the time we got to the set, I couldn’t have known him any better.”

“Untamed” mixes Turner, an Investigative Services Branch (ISB) agent, with a murder mystery that detours into issues that involve indigenous people and free-spirited hippies. Some squatters are mixed up with drug-dealing.

“Untamed” exposes, “The level of complexity that occurs in a national park and just how much is going on, how much needs to be managed and sorted out.”

There’s a majestic grandeur seeing broad-shouldered, square jawed Turner on horseback with nature’s monumental vistas a backdrop.  It’s like a throwback to Hollywood’s big ‘50s Technicolor Westerns where the scenery was vital to understanding the loner at the story’s center.

“Yes! That’s what jumped off the page when I read the first episode, why I wanted to be involved. I just thought the setting was so special and it had the potential to mix up the genre in a way as well.”

Alongside Bana there’s Rosemary DeWitt as Turner’s ex-wife Jill, Lily Santiago’s Naya Vasquez who left the LAPD to retrench with her 4-year-old son in the great outdoors, and Sam Neill as Yosemite’s chief park ranger.

For Bana and Neill, world cinema titans from, respectively, Australia and New Zealand, “Untamed” is a long-delayed teaming.

“When Sam and I got together, we talked about the fact,” Bana said, “that not only had we never worked together, we’d never actually been in the same room as each other for our entire careers.

“So it was a sweet moment where we both felt like we really knew each other. If in fact, we’d never met.”

“Untamed” streams on Netflix July 18