Bana ‘of the glinting helmet’

In “Troy,” the current cinematic rendition of “The Iliad,” Eric Bana plays one of Western lit’s archetypal heroes. Throughout the ancient text that inspired the film he is always “great Hector of the glinting helmet.” “With him,” the verse goes, “went under arms far the largest army and the bravest fighters.”

“Those are things that freak you out when you read the script,” Bana says. “There are things that you can learn, and then there are things that you can’t learn. Anyone with time can learn to fight with a sword. Anyone with a good degree of bravery and balance can learn how to bareback horse ride. But the thing that couldn’t be taught to me was how to feel like I am the prince of Troy that 100,000 troops look up to.”

So the 35-year-old Melbourne-born actor, former stand-up comedian and happily married father of two spent a couple of agonizing weeks two years ago searching for the Hector within himself. And he would like to announce that compared with the turmoil and torturous self-doubt of those days, even press junket tedium (Is he moving to Hollywood? Is he hanging out with the rest of the Australian movie mafia?) is a breeze.

His cordial, accented speech, strewn with sleepy vowels, further encourages the belief that he’s not someone tainted by the spoils of fame or trapped by the automatisms of stardom, and so does his generous and unrehearsed use of profanity. Just a likable mate with scruffy, curly hair, several days’ growth of beard and soulful brown eyes.

When he talks about his part as Hector, his brow furrows, the eyes growing deeper still: “What I really liked about this character was that just about everything he does in the movie is not from his control. He’s a leader but at the same time he’s powerless. He’s at the mercy of other people’s stupid decisions.”

Hector’s a kind of noble loser pitted against vainglorious victor Achilles, played with vigor by Brad Pitt.

Rich roles, big directors

Though “Troy” occasionally slips into epic camp, movie critics generally agree that Bana shines uniformly -- and he does so in the glow of Pitt’s megastar wattage. “He comes off as a real man’s man,” one reviewer observed.

Bana’s Hector is also a measure of the actor’s own instinct for picking rich parts, even in flawed films.

There is no sorcery to it, he insists: “I’ve always had a very basic outlook, and that is that I’m obviously at the helm of the material that’s out there. I’m not a great writer; I’m a performer. So I just read a lot of scripts and try to find a great character.

“I’m completely oblivious to the size of the project. Some people say to me, ‘You’re obviously gonna go do a little indie film now!’ Do I have to do an indie film to prove something to someone? And if I find a great character in a mid-sized or in a large movie, I’m gonna turn that down just because I did ‘Troy’? You gotta be kidding me!”

His performances so far have demonstrated an interest in working with legendary directors like Ridley Scott -- for whom he camped out for six months in Morocco while shooting “Black Hawk Down,” patiently sitting out the six-day gaps between his scenes with a book in his trailer.

He said yes to playing “The Hulk,” which turned out to be last year’s box office hiccup, because he wanted to work with Taiwanese-born filmmaker Ang Lee.

“It was not a simple film to make,” he says now. “Because it was so overshot it has a very moody, torturous kind of vibe -- making it felt like that too. I wouldn’t say it was fun. It was different. But I think everything you do makes you grow, so....”

Absorbing experience and growing seem to be what motivates him. Preparing to become Hector, Bana not only read “The Iliad,” but dug deep into the biographies of World War II leaders (Winston Churchill, George Patton, Erwin Rommel) and the oeuvre of pop mythologist Joseph Campbell.

“The best part of this job for me is that time you have when you’re researching a character or a subject matter that you’re not really aware of and you’re learning stuff,” he says. “I didn’t go past high school, so to me it’s just a thrill, and just as much fun as the shooting.”

Stand-up to hit man

Bana’s breakthrough role in film -- still the most admired step of his career -- came by playing a real-life hit man in the 2000 Aussie indie flick “Chopper.” After making his movie debut in the quick-witted ensemble comedy “The Castle” (1997), Bana bulked up to play Mark “Chopper” Read, a massive, mangled brute with gold-capped teeth and the tips of his ears sliced off. The move startled audiences who mostly knew him from a sketch-comedy show called “Full Frontal” -- Australia’s version of “Saturday Night Live.”

As a sociopath prone to rash acts of cruelty (the film introduces him head-butting a fellow inmate to death in prison), Bana’s Chopper is all the more terrifying because he is also capable of genuine humor and bouts of tenderness, as when he asks a victim he has just shot, “Are you OK?”

The actor was on his honeymoon when he got a call from “Chopper” director Andrew Dominik, who’d spent a year unsuccessfully trying to cast the part. When the two met, they spent a full day working out scenes together and by dusk Bana had the job.

Critics may still marvel at his swift, graceful transition from stand-up and sketch comedy to intensely dramatic roles, but he doesn’t think it’s that surprising. “If you go on the road with a bunch of stand-ups, you will find the deepest-thinking, most melancholy, depressed, haunted people on Earth,” he says.

Having done impressions and voices from an early age, acting “made sense to me,” says Bana, who admits he never fully recovered from the heady influence of Mel Gibson’s “Mad Max” flicks.

“But I was so bloody arrogant -- I didn’t want go to film school, I didn’t want to study drama ‘cause in a cocky way I just felt like I could already feel what it’s like to be someone else. I didn’t want to go somewhere and have someone tell me that I can’t do it.”

Various stints trying to raise cows or work as a mechanic came to an end when he walked into a Melbourne bar and stepped behind the microphone. He was to peddle his Richard Pryor-inspired stand-up routines successfully for the next decade, and his television career on “Full Frontal” took off.

He acknowledges that his path to Hollywood is unusual.

“I didn’t study in the traditional sense, but I studied in a much harder way -- I learned everything that I had to learn on the job, and in public, standing up in front of 200 strangers every night in a different town,” he says. “I’ll never forget those days -- they were really exciting. You learn a lot about yourself when you’re on the road, and going through gig after gig after gig.”

When not working on location around the world, or being caught up in the whirlwind of promoting the films he makes, he lives in Melbourne with his wife, 4 1/2-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.

“Sometimes,” he says, “I forget what I do for a living. Maybe it’s geography, maybe it’s the fact that I have a couple of kids, maybe it’s the fact that I love my hobbies so much.” As precious as home time is to him, Bana has no regrets over spending half a year shuttling around the world and collectively giving birth to “Troy” with his “nauseatingly great” cast mates and crew.

Right before Christmas last year, over the course of seven days, the last task was completed -- staging the climactic fight scene between Hector and Achilles, the payoff for half a year of physical training on the part of both actors playing the mythical heroes.

“Brad and I were really jazzed up, but there was an undertone of real melancholy about it too,” Bana says. “We knew that every time we took a blow, every time we swung our swords, we would be one step closer to our theatrical deaths. It was such a rich experience that I get very sad thinking about the fact that it’s all over.” If the reception of his “Troy” performance is any indication, equally rich experiences await Bana in the future.