"Whatever people think they hear, the reality is I'm here all the time," says Eric Bana, half-reclined on a hotel sofa in his scrubby jeans and workaday boots.
Eric Bana in Sydney promoting his new Netflix series Dirty John.Credit:Nick Moir
At this point, Bana's varied career is bookended by such twisted characters. His breakthrough in 2000's Chopper was all bug-eyed malice, while last year's The Forgiven, an apartheid-era historical thriller never released in Australia, saw Bana playing a jailed white supremacist, what he calls his "darkest ever" character. What's the appeal in playing such monsters?
"They're the sort of roles we want to kill each other for as actors," he says. "I enjoy the psychology of inhabiting these characters and the way they think, and to be honest, there are similarities between sociopathic behaviours and what actors do as a job. Your job is to have masks that come on and off, so it's not so dissimilar.
"You need to understand them, but I think it's dangerous to think that unless I can warm to this character I can't play them. That's career-limiting," he laughs.
To put another perspective on Bana's eclectic career, Dirty John also marks his first TV gig since his cameo on Kath & Kim in 2007.
Bana as John Meehan in Dirty John.Credit:Netflix
"You know, some people really seek job security, I'm like the opposite," says Bana. "I just want to be light on my feet and move around, that's how I've always been."
The Dry, which Bana starts shooting somewhere in the rural unknown with director Robert Connolly later this month, is a quintessentially Australian story, set amid a small farming community's drought-induced violence. As the son of Croatian and German immigrants, whose birth name is Banadinovic, he says he has never considered such "all-Australian" roles beyond his reach.
"That's one of the things where I'm quite lucky," he says. I have enough European heritage that my characters can go that way, but I can also go the other way a little bit. And then it comes in handy on a role like Troy, for example, or Munich."
Plus, it all also started with Chopper. And, well, Poida.
"Exactly," he says. "I've never really thought about it too much, because I've never really pigeon-holed myself in terms of the types of characters or movies I do. I've never had that internal thought that's like, 'Oh, I'm not going to be able to play this or that.'"
Bana with The Dry’s writer-director-producer Robert Connolly.Credit:Rebecca Bana
Bana says there's no overriding "mantra" to his decision to film a new flick in Australia, nor the decade-plus wait between local projects; he just liked the gig.
"I don't want to do stuff here just for the sake of it, that's never been my goal," he says. "My goal is to do films that I feel very passionately about, whether it's here or overseas. I'm always looking for that thing, and when it happens to be here it's a huge bonus. And in this case it's a ridiculous slam dunk because of the people I'm working with and the crew we're assembling."
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