Australia’s “next big thing” keeps his head on straight and his heart Down Under

“Show business is the worst joke of a psychological experiment,” Eric Bana says, perhaps revealing why he lives 8,000 miles from Los Angeles in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia. “I bet if you threw the Dalai Lama into the entertainment industry and checked back a year from now, his spirit would be completely dismantled.”

Bana laughs as he talks, but you sense he won’t be shopping for real estate in the 90210 anytime soon. It’s not that Hollywood hasn’t been good to him. The actor, who is six-foot three and looks every bit the leading man, sports a scar on his nose from clanking swords with Brad Pitt in Troy a few years back. Last year, he manwiched himself between Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson (“Fine birds,” he calls them) inThe Other Boleyn Girl, and he recently went Romulan on Mr. Spock in the latest Star Trek installment (he was virtually unrecognizable beneath pointy ears and head tattoos).

This year Bana, 41, has been exploring new frontiers. Funny People is his first mainstream American comedy; in it he plays a schmucky businessman too consumed with money and Aussie-rules football to notice that his wife (Leslie Mann) is falling in love with Adam Sandler’s character. Most recently he appeared in his first all-out romance, The Time Traveler’s Wife, in which he plays a sensitive Chicago librarian who time-travels when he gets stressed – even as the luminous Rachel McAdams bats her lashes at him in the here and now.

But the closer Bana gets to breakaway success – and once again, the buzz suggests that 2009 is his year – the more he relishes living someplace where the busboy isn’t fishing for J.J. Abrams’s cellphone number.

“Sometimes I miss the creativity and energy of Los Angeles,” says Bana, who lives in a quiet seaside suburb of Melbourne with his wife of 12 years, Rebecca Gleeson, and their two children, Klaus, 11, and Sophia, 8. (Their glass-walled four-bedroom house reportedly has its own tennis court, swimming pool and underground garage to accommodate Bana’s muscle-car collection.) “But on the other hand, the industry is a beast. I struggle with the notion that you can put your best foot forward and it can all mean nothing. People tell you on a Friday that your life’s gonna change by Monday. But then comes Monday and you still don’t feel like you’ve gotten it.”

Sounds cynical, but it might just be true. Bana’s career has had more ups and downs than this year’s Dow. Black Hawk Down,Munich,Hulk – they were all supposed to make the actor a household name. Instead, he’d end up rolling his eyes and returning Down Under to plot his next move. “I’m really comfortable with things failing,” Bana says. “I simply pour myself a cup of coffee and move on.” He hesitates and laughs again. “Of course, before I have my coffee, I can be a miserable son of a bitch.”

“Eric’s a pretty level-headed guy and he’s got a good sense of humour about the business,” says writer and director Judd Apatow, who cast Bana in Funny People after seeing YouTube clips of his celebrity impersonations (Ah-nold, Sly, Tom Cruise) from Full Frontal, the early-nineties Australian sketch-comedy series. The low-budget TV show gave Bana, who grew up impersonating characters in his working-class Melbourne neighbourhood, his professional start and led to his own Aussie sketch program, The Eric Bana Show Live. That in turn landed him a role in The Castle, an offbeat 1997 feature comedy about a family facing eviction during an expansion at the Melbourne airport. It is usually cited among Australia’s most beloved comedies.

But Bana had to do the Raging Bull thing to get serious attention. To portray the murderous Australian criminal Chopper Read in the 2000 biopic Chopper, he shaved his head, gained thirty pounds and spent five hours each morning being inked with fake tattoos. Critics hailed his portrayal as a star-making performance on par with countryman Russell Crowe’s breakout role in Romper Stomper, and even Bana was temporarily convinced. “You’re getting phone calls from people you wouldn’t believe,” he says of the time. “You’re moving your whole life around. It’s incredibly exciting. I felt very fortunate for all the attention but the attention was short-lived.”

Yes and no. The performance convinced Ridley Scott to cast Bana as a Yankee soldier in Black Hawk Down, and the slow march to mainstream success began. Bana, though, has almost purposely sidestepped the usual path to stardom. He never went to drama school or paid dues in theatre. While other young actors pump out three or four movies a year, until 2009 Bana averaged one a year. And he’s probably the last actor anyone would label a Hollywood diva. As Star Trek director J.J. Abrams says, “Eric is egoless, and that’s rare. Not a lot of actors as big as he is – who’ve made movies with Steven Spielberg, for god sakes – would be as willing as Eric was to shave his head, wear facial makeup, pointy ears and generally go unrecognizable the way he did. With Eric, acting isn’t about ‘me, me, me.’”

If anything, Bana’s real passion lies outside acting, as was recently chronicled in a documentary he made called Love the Beast. The film, which premiered at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, tracks his 25-year relationship with a 1974 Ford XB Falcon Coupe, “the muscle car of muscle cars.” Before he took up acting in his early 20s, Bana, the son of Croatian and German émigrés (his family name is actually Banadinovich) assumed he would become a car mechanic

“I was quite lost professionally for a period of time and it was obvious I was not going on to college,” he says. “My parents were concerned, and probably for good reason, so it was a great relief when I could finally support myself by performing.”

Bana’s first showbiz paycheque was $60 for doing standup at a local Melbourne pub. From there, his fee went from $90 to $120 to $300 to $400 to “maybe I can actually do this for a living.” Growing up, his entertainment idols were multi-tasking comedians like Richard Prior and Eddie Murphy. “What I loved about them was that they understood the bigger picture. Comedy, movies, TV. They didn’t just stop at one thing. I realized at some point, that’s something that I can do too.” As Apatow says, “Eric has this wonderful confidence that really is other to me. Maybe it’s the Australian in him but he has a can-do energy, combined with his ridiculous good looks, that makes you go, ‘There’s my breed of man and then there’s Eric.’ You just don’t try to compete with that.”

Bana got his first taste of Los Angeles at 22, back when VIP treatment meant getting the bottom bunk at a youth hostel in Venice. “I was enjoying myself too much at the time to worry about how crappy my surroundings were,” says Bana, who spent six months that year cruising around America in a 1979 Mustang. “If I couldn’t find a place to stay or was low on cash, I’d sleep in the car, which meant I usually slept in the car.”

Bana says he sometimes thinks about that trip now, especially on days when producers or leading ladies or breathless journalists insist he’s going to be “the next fucking whoever,” as he puts it. “It’s humbling to remember how much of a nobody you were when you started because, really, has anything actually changed? I’m still basically the same person. I still love the same footy team and the same cars. I still have a lot of the same friends. And I’m still pretty realistic about my level of fame.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter what they tell you on a Friday; come Monday “some uncontrollable force will intervene and you’re just getting started again.” Bana lets out a long sigh that ends with a bit of a chuckle. “I guess that’s what keeps bringing me back to America. I can’t resist the fun.”