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
