Eric Bana, a character actor at heart. Photo: Ryan Pfluger for New York Magazine “It’s an interesting morning in my country,” Eric Bana is telling me over Zoom from Melbourne, Australia. It’s late May, and he’s just learned that the state of Victoria will be entering another heavy COVID-19 lockdown. Melbourne is where pandemic restrictions primarily hit Australia throughout 2020, and this setback is clearly very frustrating. “We’re all a bit scarred,” he says.
I was in L.A. at the time and got a phone call saying, “Steven would like to meet with you. He’s shooting a film out in the desert.” He was shooting The Terminal with Tom Hanks and I drove out there. I had some intel that there were a few different projects that he was working on. But no one knew what the specifics were. Fortunately, by sheer coincidence, I had read Vengeance.
There’s an interesting formal journey in the film. In early scenes, you guys are out in the sun and it’s warm and collegial. Then the film gradually changes style, so that by the end you’re sleeping in dark, crowded dens with the very people you’re pursuing. It’s an interesting way of showing …It can’t have been too close to being in sequence just because of the location jumps. But it never felt jarring to me, so maybe it was relatively sympathetic.
You progressed fairly quickly in your comedy career. Do you recall one bit that just absolutely killed? It was a great lesson because it made me aware that my style didn’t suit every room. I think it’s a really great experience to go through, in terms of breaking down scripts, or trying to identify when something’s working or not, or understanding what might be your strength or what might be your weakness. And going, “Well, it’s okay to say no to stuff that you think you might be really bad at.”
It sounds like the leap to sketch comedy was fairly organic for you. How did you make the leap to drama? Chopper feels like such a huge risk for a relatively new actor — the part is so dramatic and so central to whether that picture will work or not. I wasn’t naïve about that. I did understand that it was a rare opportunity. Because he was so unique. When’s another character like that going to come around for anyone? So it was a case of just, “Well shit, I’d better be good. I better be as real as possible, otherwise that’s it from me. I’ll never work again.” You have to remember, I thought 100 people would see [Chopper]. And it took a long, long time for a number of people to see it.
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