It’s all Hans Holbein’s fault. Having convinced Henry VIII that dreary Anne of Cleves was the choicest bit of crumpet to have walked the Rhineland, the artist did a number on Henry himself. Holbein’s famous portrait of him – stern, stout, red-bearded, quite possibly about to chuck a chicken leg over his shoulder – has remained the template for the monarch ever since. On screen, from Robert Shaw’s lusty megalomaniac (A Man for All Seasons) to Sid James’s lusting nymphomaniac (Carry on Henry), Holbein’s image, by and large, has been conformed to. Only recently has there has been a little deviation: Ray Winstone’s East End godfather in the television Henry VIII, for example, or Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s uncanny approximation of Rick from The Young Ones in the wonderfully trashy The Tudors.

Now, at last there is acknowledgment that before the gout-ridden spouse-decapitator came the young buck: athlete and aesthete, albeit with attention deficit disorder. “Which was exciting for me, because I felt I could give a new version for an audience that had been exposed to all those interpretations in the past, a legitimate and believable version of those younger years, which we’re not so familiar with,” enthuses Eric Bana, the latest thesp to suit up as the turbulent Tudor. In the big-screen version of The Other Boleyn Girl, adapted from Philippa Gregory’s bestseller, Bana plays Henry as a smouldering, hirsute stud, reclining on the furs of his kingly boudoir, only a cheroot away from Burt Reynolds in that infamous Cosmo centrefold of the 1970s. “I couldn’t believe it was based somewhat in truth. I was fascinated by it.” And why not, when you can enjoy a romp in the ermine with the Boleyn sisters, Anne and Mary (Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson), pawns in the power play of their ambitious uncle, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey)?

Bana is not the first Australian to have a crack at the king (that was Keith Michell, in TV’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII), nor even the first actor to appear in this specific role, Jared Harris having put on the doublet in the BBC’s low-budget take on this same story five years ago. But does he care? Not really. “I guess he’s been done so many times that one of the most important things for me was not to look at anyone else’s version,” Bana stresses. “It was frustrating, because I wanted to, but I just knew I couldn’t. It was gonna restrict me.” The videos are all stacked up at home, however. “I look forward to seeing them,” he laughs. “I can do some swotting now that we’ve finished.”

If the 39-year-old is not quite a household name, his face is certainly familiar, from Black Hawk Down, Troy and Munich. His Henry merely confirms that when it comes to playing tall, dark and handsome, not to mention deep and brooding, Bana is now officially Hollywood’s man. In the flesh, the lofty actor (6ft 3in) is indeed a good-looking fellow, though his convivial, blokeish demeanour, in contrast to his often fierce screen persona, amounts to a welcome and quintessential case of antipodean laid-back. (He burps: “Pardon me.”) We in the UK, however, have been blithely unaware of Bana’s previous incarnation. Ten years ago, he was better known in Oz as a television comic, doing rather pointedly hopeless impressions of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Cruise in the low-rent sketch show Full Frontal. “At home, I have the opposite problem, where nobody can possibly take you seriously, because all they know you for is idiot behaviour,” he says.

The turnaround came in 2000, when Bana quit television to star in the Australian independent feature Chopper, a biopic of the underworld figure Chopper Read – a bullet-headed nutcase whose main claim to fame is that he had both ears sliced off with a razor. Bana’s decision to do a De Niro, eating his way up a couple of stone and immersing himself in his character’s manic energy, not only made the film a cult triumph but brought him to the attention of the producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who urged Ridley Scott to cast him in the military-in-Mogadishu drama Black Hawk Down. Brad Pitt, with whom Bana has since struck up a friendship, had also seen Chopper, and lobbied for Bana to play the doomed, heroic Hector opposite his Achilles in Wolfgang Petersen’s sword-and-sandals epic Troy.

It’s an ascent Bana still can’t quite get his head round. Troy was “a bloody amazing experience”, he gushes, recalling the cast-of-thousands action in Malta and Mexico. Even Henry VIII, he concedes, “is not someone I thought I’d ever play. Growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne, it was as likely as jumping on the space shuttle and being part of the Nasa space programme”. As Eric Banadinovich, born to a Croatian father and a German mother, the closest he had come to showbiz was when he was persuaded to leave his bartending job and channel his gift for mimicry into a stand-up act – something, he says, that was a far harder grind than anything he’s done since. “It’s a pretty brutal world going from town to town entertaining drunks every night, standing up in front of complete strangers. They say acting’s a weird job, but it’s certainly not as weird as that.”

I wonder, given his background, why he doesn’t try his hand at some screen comedy? He doesn’t get to smile a lot in his films, does he? But those days are behind him, he says, unless he’s given the chance to write his own material. Moreover, Hollywood is simply ignorant of his past. “I don’t get sent a lot of funny stuff, which I’m fine with,” he says with a shrug. The studios may be wary of chancing their arm after 2003’s The Hulk. With Bana (Eric) as Banner (Bruce), it was supposed to launch a brand-new superhero franchise, until perceived underperformance at the box office caused a rethink. Bana doesn’t exactly burst out of his shirt here, but it’s the one moment when he does get slightly animated, pointing out that this is something of a misconception: the film did rather well commercially, but suffered by comparison with the rival Spider-Man, and was stuffed, too, by the critics, who were more interested in its status as an Ang Lee flick. “What I want to tell them is to get off themselves and speak to some 12-year-old boys,” he harrumphs. “I bump into kids all the time who love it. And it’s had a tremendous life on DVD.”

DVD, it seems, is where it’s at for Bana, an egalitarian system where “people get to pick and choose and enjoy films without them being shoved down your throat”. He declares: “You go to a Blockbuster and all DVDs occupy the same amount of space. The only thing that really matters is what the films are like five or 10 years down the track. And I think, in almost every case, they’ve gotten better with time.” Even Lucky You, he adds, his one blot, a poker drama with Drew Barrymore, that tanked when it came out last year.

The collapse of a Hulk sequel even had a plus side: it allowed Bana to do the inspired-by-real-events thriller Munich. As Avner, a conflicted Mossad assassin, he heads the gang that tracks down and eliminates the perpetrators of the 1972 Olympic massacre. “Munich meant so much to me, because I grew up watching 1970s cinema, then suddenly I was in a movie set in the 1970s, with Spielberg directing. It was just unbelievable,” he says. It is probably his finest performance. What does he make of Spielberg’s decision to pull out of his role as artistic adviser to the Beijing Games? Bana smiles, but won’t be drawn. But then he seems a world away from the high-end power posturing of Hollywood. Through all his success, he has remained resident in Melbourne with his wife and kids, spending much of his downtime watching Aussie-rules football (“The best boys’ sport, c’mon, let’s be honest”) or indulging his passion for racing – and crashing – “historic muscle cars” on the rally circuit, chiefly “an Australian two-door Falcon coupé, similar to the one they used in Mad Max, a great f***ing 600-horsepower monster I’ve had since I was 15, when I built it with my mates”.

In that sense, Bana has flown in the face of compatriots Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett and the late Heath Ledger, who all bolted from Australia the minute they got a whiff of success. He doesn’t blame them. “I think we can do just as much good for the industry by taking ourselves out of the pond and letting someone else have a crack at the cinema that’s being made there,” he says, a conclusion he reached after a film he did down under recently, Romulus, My Father. It was critically hailed, but ran into traditional difficulty when it came to securing international distribution. “It’s so hard for Australian films,” he sighs. “We just won a swag of awards for it. We were in the Toronto film festival – and I may as well have run down the main street naked.”

There will be no such stunts needed for Star Trek, the all-new episode of the sci-fi saga directed by JJ Abrams (creator of Lost and Cloverfield), which is about to start shooting, with Bana as the intergalactic villain of the piece. Nor for The Time Traveller’s Wife, adapted from Audrey Niffenberger’s novel, which was optioned as a transdimensional romance for Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, but which Bana recently finished filming opposite Rachel McAdams.

If that sticks to the original plot, he really will be romping down the road starkers. “You’ll have to wait and see the movie,” he grins. “I may well have done that.”

The Other Boleyn Girl opens on Friday

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