.:BIO:.
Well, he was born Eric Banadinovich in Melbourne, Australia, on the 9th of August, 1968, the son of a Croatian father and German mother. As a kid he lived a typical suburban life in Tullamarine, out on the western edge of the city, near the airport. Melbourne is famed as the most vibrantly cosmopolitan of Australian towns, but Bana's upbringing was typically Aussie. He describes his young self as an "infatuated rev-head", obsessed with cars and motorbikes. It's an obsession that lasts to this day. Having driven in big races like the Targa Tasmania and the Adelaide Classic, in 2003 Bana would become the official patron of the Dick Johnson Racing Company - the former star driver Johnson being one of Eric's earliest heroes. And remember, this was nothing like the glamorous, money-drenched world of Formula One or Indie Car - this was about the V8 Supercar Championship, rough and hard, more Mad Max than Monza. Bana was staying true to his working-class roots.
For Bana, school was fairly uneventful. He was bright and, growing to 6' 4", powerful, but the thing that marked him most was a singular tragedy. When a very close friend died from cancer, young Eric was profoundly affected. Harshly taught the lesson that we can take nothing for granted, he felt fortunate for every new day and, heeding his Dad's dictum that "luck is preparation met by opportunity", put his all into everything he did.
On leaving school, he worked as a labourer for a transport company down on the wharf. This was just one in a string of menial jobs, including washing cars at a service station, pushing trolleys at Coles New World and picking up glasses in bars. They didn't forward his career much but, along with that rev-head adolescence, they did bring him into contact with a host of unusual and eccentric characters, many of whom, as a natural mimic, he would study and imitate for laughs. He was already aware of his gift for entertaining people and, naturally influenced by the thrills and spills of Mad Max, had decided he wanted to act.
But it was another influence that first kick-started him on the road to the top. A big fan of Richard Pryor, he was forever cracking people up with his gags, pranks and rapidly growing collection of impressions. Come 1991, while working as a barman at Melbourne's Castle Hotel, he was persuaded to try his hand at stand-up and proved an immediate success. For the next two years, he played at inner-city pubs, supporting himself by clearing tables. As ever, he was preparing for opportunity. One fellow comic remembers how Eric, unlike all the others, had business cards printed up - no chance would pass him by.
The first big one came with a performance on Steve Vizard's Tonight Live show. This led to an invitation to join the Full Frontal team, a comedy troupe with a very popular TV sketch series. Eric's impressions of Columbo, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ray Martin, Sylvester Stallone, John Farnham, Tom Cruise and Warwick Copper would make him one of the show's most popular turns. When he finally left in 1996 - by which time he had toured Australia's club circuit with Full Frontal and was a stand-up star in his own right - he produced, wrote and starred in a solo special, simply called Eric, for Channel Seven. It was such a success that it led his own series, The Eric Bana Show Live, which saw him interviewing star guests, performing skits and, unusually, sat in his car hilariously setting the world to rights.
Unfortunately, The Eric Bana Show Live was not a ratings success and was not given a second series, despite Eric being named Most Popular Comedian at the Logies and hosting a Comic Relief special that raised $380,000 for Community Aid Abroad. Yet this made no odds to Bana who'd already set his sights on an acting career. Inevitably, given his meteoric rise, when he made his screen debut in 1997 it was in one of Australia's biggest ever hits, The Castle. This took him right back to his roots as it featured the working-class Kerrigan family, living right beside the airport. A little band of Candides they believe everything is right in their world, despite the constant thundering of aircraft, then are forced to protect their lowly abode when airport expansion results in a compulsory purchase order. Eric's role, as the daughter's kickboxing accountant husband, was small, but it was a great start. The movie was a major sleeper hit. Filmed in eleven days for just $19,000, it was bought by Miramax for $6 million.
Having married Rebecca Gleeson, a former publicist for the Seven Network (she'd give birth to son Klaus in 1999, then daughter Sophia in 2002), Bana moved on to what would be his breakthrough role. This was in Chopper, a fictionalised biopic of Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read, one of Australia's most notorious criminals, who claimed to have killed 19 people and cut off his own ears in prison to avoid being whacked by enemies. Having turned to writing about his exploits, he'd become a best-selling author and a master of (often unbelievable) self-publicity.
Director Andrew Dominik had been working on the project for some five years and was having real trouble casting the titular lead. Russell Crowe was a favourite, particularly due to his brutal turn as Hando in Romper Stomper, but now had bigger fish to fry. Eventually, Read himself suggested that they audition Bana, having seen him perform a skit about Broadmeadow yobs on TV. Dominik was against the idea, but was persuaded by producer Greg Apps. Eric was called by his agent and thoroughly nonplussed by the idea. Besides, he was about to depart on honeymoon and couldn't race to Sydney for the screen-test. Happily, they were prepared to wait two weeks and, some two months later, Dominik and Apps had cast a comedian as their country's most brutal serial murderer. It was a huge risk, like casting Alistair MacGowan as Fred West - but what an inspired choice it turned out to be.
To play the role, Bana shaved his head and put on 30 pounds, mostly by gorging on cinnamon doughnuts. He also spent two days with Read himself, to perfect his mimicry. He'd arrive on set at 4 each morning, spending five hours in makeup (Read is covered in distinctive tattoos). And, incredibly, he was superb. Appearing in nearly every shot, he was menacing, paranoid, egomaniacal, clueless, manipulative, unpredictable and thoroughly weird. It was a rare test for an actor, Read suffering from uncontrollable mood swings that would turn him from an eager-to-please teddy bear to a raving psycho in an instant, and then back again. In one scene he stabs a guy repeatedly in the neck then, as he's dying in a pool of blood, asks "Are you OK?" and offers him a cigarette. Elsewhere he shoots a drug dealer then drives him to hospital. Read was massively complex - funny and homicidal, gregarious and utterly distant - a man who would kill purely so he could boast about killing. Bana could easily have done a Pacino and completely overblown it. He didn't, he was brilliantly believable.
This was a starring debut of some force. US critic Roger Ebert said of Eric "He has a quality no acting school can teach you and few actors can match. You cannot look away from him". With typically aggressive humour Read commented "a top fella, but get your ears off, mate... whatever happened to Method Acting?" The film, refusing to glorify or condemn Read's behaviour, began a Natural Born Killers-style controversy and went to Number One in Australia, managing to dislodge The Patriot, starring Oz's favourite adopted son, in the process.
Bana spent months touring the festival circuit with Chopper, where his performance was often compared to that of Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. High praise indeed, and it made Bana think even harder about his career. He knew that his next role had better be "bloody good" or it was all over. At the time he'd taken the part of Joe Sabatini in a new soap opera, Something In The Air, concerning the small town dramas of Emu Springs, a community dominated by its local radio station and Rules Football team. Sabatini was a good old boy, dedicated to his farm, wife and mates. Of Italian immigrant stock, he was prone to boil over, made execrable wine and had a (bad) poem for every occasion. For Bana, this was good experience but easy work, hardly challenging for a man who'd won Best Actor from the Australian Film Institute and the Stockholm Film Festival for Chopper. He needed a step up, and fast.
Thankfully, he now had an American agent and, with Chopper serving as an impressive audition tape, he won the part of Norm "Hoot" Hooten in Black Hawk Down, his US film debut. This was a true story concerning 123 elite troops from the US Rangers and Delta Force, who are air-dropped into Somalia to take out the top henchmen of a warlord who's ripping off Red Cross funds and causing the starvation of hundreds of thousands. Preparing with a 2-week Special Forces boot camp at Fort Bragg, Bana threw himself into the role of the super-sniper and military legend taking it to the enemy when the US troops discover they've severely underestimated the warlord's fire-power. Most reviews would pick out his performance over those of Ewan McGregor and Josh Hartnett.
Leaving Something In The Air far behind, and having briefly returned to the Melbourne stand-up scene with his Standing In The Corner show, now he was on his way. He returned to Oz to film The Nugget, a comedy based on John Steinbeck's The Pearl, where three road workers who go prospecting at weekends (as an excuse to gab and get drunk) stumble upon a boulder-sized hunk of gold. Naturally, this changes things, particularly when the nugget is stolen, and the happy-go-lucky trio are forced to re-examine their value systems. It was a semi-successful feel-good effort with Bana coasting as the excruciatingly unlucky Lotto, the smart but uneducated leader of the gang, who at one point loses a scratch-card down a drain and spends days digging up the whole street looking for it. It wasn't what he was used to, after Chopper and Black Hawk Down, but he took it anyway because the script made him laugh, reminded him of his suburban Melbourne home and would be suitable for his own children.
Bana was now much in demand in the US. Indeed, he'd turned down the lead in xXx to take The Nugget (Vin Diesel stepping in instead). Eric's next action epic would be far more ambitious - he took on The Hulk. Ordinarily, he wouldn't have been interested but was keen to work with director Ang Lee who he admired for The Ice Storm. He liked Lee's ideas for The Hulk who, like Chopper, was a character suffering from loss of self-control. This would be no standard super-hero picture with CGI monsters and effects. Bana's face would be superimposed over that of the green giant - he would be acting throughout. So, there he was as Bruce Banner, an arrogant student brought onto a top secret military project to build the cell-altering Gammasphere. Naturally, things go hideously wrong and, despite the efforts of the compassionate Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) Banner's inner demons come to exhibit themselves in a big, green, angry way.
Following The Hulk would be another major picture, Wolfgang Petersen's Troy. Here Bana, after only five films, found himself playing Hector, ordered by his father King Priam (Peter O'Toole) to protect the city against the invading Greeks, led into battle by Brad Pitt's Achilles. Only five films and he was there already - Peter O'Toole, Brad Pitt and Eric Bana. Preparation had met opportunity for sure, and Bana had joined fellow Aussies Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman and Toni Collette at the top of the tree. Discounting Sam Neill and Russell Crowe (both from New Zealand) and Mel Gibson (born American), he was up there with Hugh Jackman as his country's biggest acting export. Not bad for a rev-head comedian from Tullamarine...
- Dominic Wills
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