THIS MAN IS GONNA BE HUGE

SO who's the star of $140m summer blockbuster The Hulk? A glance at the poster, the merchandise, the computer game or the dinky little plastic goblins free at Burger King strongly suggests that it's a not- so-jolly green giant, a musclebound behemoth who looks like Frankenstein's monster after intensive triathlon training. A glance at the credits, though, and heading a cast of experienced hands - grizzled Sam Elliott, even-more-grizzled Nick Nolte and Oscar-winner Jennifer Connelly - is a Hollywood greenhorn: Eric Bana. A tall, lithe, likeable Aussie bloke, Bana plays Bruce Banner, a repressed brainiac who transforms into an enormous mute brute when he gets agitated.
THIS MAN IS GONNA BE HUGE

SO who's the star of $140m summer blockbuster The Hulk? A glance at the poster, the merchandise, the computer game or the dinky little plastic goblins free at Burger King strongly suggests that it's a not- so-jolly green giant, a musclebound behemoth who looks like Frankenstein's monster after intensive triathlon training. A glance at the credits, though, and heading a cast of experienced hands - grizzled Sam Elliott, even-more-grizzled Nick Nolte and Oscar-winner Jennifer Connelly - is a Hollywood greenhorn: Eric Bana. A tall, lithe, likeable Aussie bloke, Bana plays Bruce Banner, a repressed brainiac who transforms into an enormous mute brute when he gets agitated.
Unfortunately, being an entirely computer-generated character, the Hulk doesn't do many interviews. So while it's his ugly green mug on the lunchboxes, it's left to Bana to take the promotional strain. And with The Hulk being the latest addition to the burgeoning genre of comic book-sourced movies (after recent hits Spider-Man, Daredevil and both X-Mens), there's been a media tsunami.

"I try to roll with it because you can't change it," he sighs. "I don't do movies back-to-back, so hopefully I can talk about each of them in an enthusiastic, fresh way because I have a genuine affection for them. But there does come a point where you start to go insane. The first day of the US junket, I did 65 television interviews, which is, quite literally, a form of torture. It would have been a quick solution to the war if they'd threatened Saddam Hussein with that from day one: if you don't reveal your weapons of mass destruction, you will be subjected to a US press junket."

And one of the questions that would come up all the time: what the hell is Ang Lee - the acclaimed auteur responsible for Eat Drink Man Woman, The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - doing directing a movie based on a Stan Lee comic book?

Bana can't answer that one, of course. Nor can he definitively say why Ang Lee cast him, virtually unknown in the US despite an excellent turn in Black Hawk Down, as the bottled-up Jekyll to a lumbering CGI Hyde. "I didn't test in the traditional sense," says Bana. But it's a good bet Ang saw his debut film performance Chopper in 2001, a biopic of charismatic Aussie sociopath Mark "Chopper" Read. In the movie, Bana - already famous in his native Australia as a sketch show comedian on TV - demonstrated his range by convincingly playing a violent bear of a man with a hair-trigger temper. Bana dominated the screen; attempting to control violent impulses but all too often unleashing them with horrific results. In short, maybe Ang liked him when he was angry.

But in The Hulk, Bana never actually gets to blow his top. His Banner - all tortured angst behind brown, millpool eyes - knows he's got something dangerous inside of him but doesn't dare open up, not even to his beautiful co-worker Betty Ross (played by Connelly). How do you approach that sort of internalised performance, especially when everyone who's read the comic or seen the successful 1970s TV series is sitting in the cinema eagerly waiting for you to flip out?

"It is intense and it's gruelling," he says. "Anxiety and that level of stress is a very difficult thing to do, it's not like you can come up with tools to fake that kind of stuff. It's taxing but at the end of each day, it feels like you've done a day's work. You don't feel like you've walked through it."

But wasn't it frustrating, working up to a point of Vesuvian anger but never getting that orgasmic release?

"I'd just go and wreck my trailer," he laughs. "In a way, it helped to just stay in that realm all the time and not be allowed out of it."

And the best things about the role - apart from the inevitable profile-raising? Well, Bana got to butt heads with his acting hero Nick Nolte, who plays his unhinged father with near-feral relish. Plus, the considerable amount of CGI scenes meant days off while his green alter-ego trashed tanks, grounded helicopters and tore up half of San Francisco. Bana gratefully spent this down-time with his wife Rebecca and their two young children, who'd relocated from their Melbourne home for the duration of the shoot.