LOS ANGELES -- Bruce Banner has the same relationship with the Hulk that a paper bag has with microwave popcorn: Both exist mainly to burst apart and unleash the main attraction. In the new movie version of Hulk, the task of playing the weak, human alter ego of a gargantuan monster with emerald skin fell to little-known Australian actor Eric Bana.
The role may be thankless, but Bana is grateful. These days, there's no better way to get the attention of mainstream moviegoers than to have a superhero make the introduction.
The rugged 34-year-old, sporting a thin, neat beard and biceps bulging out of his T-shirt, said he liked the tragic elements of Banner, a scientist exposed to radiation that turns him into a monster when he gets angry.
"It's not like he jumps into a phone booth and puts on a cape or goes into the bat-cave, you know what I mean? Uncontrollably, he becomes the Hulk and he's haunted by that," Bana says in his Down Under accent.
In the renowned 1970s TV show, the late Bill Bixby tag-teamed the role with muscleman Lou Ferrigno. Bixby played Banner as a middle-aged loner and a green-painted Ferrigno would take over as the monster after a series of shots showing bulging muscles tearing through clothes.
Bana had no such physical co-star. The movie's monster leaps through the air, clings to fighter jets, falls from the stratosphere and hurls tanks across the desert -- all through the special-effects work of Industrial Light & Magic. Bana had little idea what the Hulk would look like, apart from the description he got from director Ang Lee, whose other credits include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Sense and Sensibility.
Lee said he selected Bana because he wanted an unknown but good-looking face. "In the comic books, I think nobody cares about Bruce Banner. He's a loser, he's a wimp," Lee said. "But a movie is photography, a realistic image. It's very hard to watch a wimp for that long."
The hardest part for Bana was that most of his scenes required him to be weak, sad, afraid and restrained. The computer- graphics designers took over for the rowdy blow-ups.
"There is kind of no release," he said of his performance. "In some ways, it's more draining. It may be physically more exhausting to do something big and physical, but I found on the days where he's really on the verge of Hulking out -- but doesn't -- they were the most taxing."
Bana was an occasional bartender, mechanic and delivery man living in his home town of Melbourne through the 1980s before trying his hand at stand-up comedy.
To his surprise, he became a hit. After touring clubs for two years, he landed a role on the Australian sketch comedy show Full Frontal, which he compares to Saturday Night Live. In 1997, he got his own self-titled live show.
Apart from impressions and other oddball characters, Bana became famous for playing the dimwitted yokel Peter. "He was a kind of mullet-head, rev-head," Bana said. "He went bananas . . . and would interview famous people and get away with absolutely blue murder because of who he was."
His first big movie role was the freaky 2001 crime drama Chopper. Bana played the title character, a flabby, tattooed real-life Australian criminal who whose ignorance rivalled his brutality.
Chopper toured the film festival circuit and made Hollywood directors notice Bana. "Rather than screaming from the rooftop: 'Look at me!' it was the other way around," the actor said.
Since then he had a small role in Black Hawk Down and lent his voice to Anchor, a wannabe-vegetarian hammerhead shark, in the computer-animated Finding Nemo. Recently he has been in Malta filming the role of Hector, leader of the ancient Trojan army, for next year's epic battle film Troy. Brad Pitt stars as his Greek rival, Achilles.
Bana still lives in Melbourne with his two children -- a four-year-old son and one-year-old daughter -- and his wife Rebecca.
