Eric Bana

Apatow first took serious notice of Bana in Munich, and he did research on YouTube into the actor’s comedy background, which is little known on this side of the Pacific. Bana joined the stand-up circuit in Melbourne some 20 years ago as a rank amateur with no experience apart from amusing his mates with impersonations. Before that, he says, he’d never thought of studying acting—“to me, going to drama school would have been like going to NASA”—but then, he didn’t have any other professional plans to pursue.

“Stand-up came out of three things,” Bana explains. “Frustration, necessity and arrogance. I didn’t have a great career ahead of me in anything. Someone literally said to me, ‘You should try stand-up,’ and took me to a venue. One guy onstage was pretty good, and the other three just sucked. I was like, ‘They’re getting paid? I think I want to give this a try.’”

Over the next decade, Bana built a career that eventually led him to Full Frontal, an antipodean Little Britain–type comedy sketch show full of boisterous blowhards with accents that are nearly indecipherable to foreigners. Four years later, in 1997, Bana became a marquee name with The Eric Bana Show Live, which highlighted the actor’s knack for caricaturing Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others. (Fortunately, he has yet to encounter any of his early targets in the flesh.)

This belly-laugh résumé unexpectedly led Bana to the grittiest and arguably best role of his career when he was cast as notorious Australian convict Mark Brandon Read in the 2000 movie Chopper, directed by Andrew Dominik (who later made The Assassination of Jesse James, with Brad Pitt). “We read every working Australian actor who was even vaguely appropriate for the part,” says Dominik, who notes that Read, who claims to have murdered 19 men and wrote a best-selling memoir from prison, himself suggested Bana after seeing him on Full Frontal and noting a physical resemblance. “Eric just did Read really well, and after working with him for a day, I knew he was the guy. It was very difficult to get people to finance the film with Eric, though. It was like casting Seth Meyers in Raging Bull.”

Bana says that the transition wasn’t hard, and he dismisses the notion that acting is a “shrouded mystery” distinct from what a comic does to create a persona. “If you can jump up onstage and make people laugh, shouldn’t you also be able to inhabit a character?” he asks, as if this were a commonsense observation. “To me it wasn’t like there was a Grand Canyon between the two. I never saw any reason why you wouldn’t attempt that next step.”