Eric the ready

As the star of Hulk and one of Australia's biggest TV comedy performers, Eric Bana is a household name 'back home' - and he's about to become an international celebrity with his role as Hector in Troy.

Tall and dark, Bana, 35, is today dressed in jeans, brown boots and a crisp white shirt, and he displays an easy charm that's typically Australian.

His on-screen wife, Andromache, played by Saffron Burrows, has said that it was 'rather lovely having Eric play my husband'. Some men might swoon at such praise, but Bana wears the evidence of being married on both hands - a wedding band and a silver ring on which is engraved the word corragio - courage in Italian - a gift from his wife Rebecca.

Far from romancing his on-set colleagues, Bana was most famous for entertaining the actors and crew with his impersonations throughout the five months he spent filming in Malta.

But today he is oddly coy about his secret talent, and won't divulge which famous faces he treated the cast to. 'I must have been having fun, though, because I started on them early,' he says, laughing. 'I don't think I did any on the set of Hulk - it was all too serious.'

Bana admits that his background in comedy - he started his career in 1991 as a stand-up comedian in a Melbourne bar - has helped his acting. 'Sketch comedy teaches you how to become someone else,' he explains.

From stand-up, he moved on to an Australian TV sketch show, Full Frontal, which led to his own eponymous TV show.

His first big break came in 2000 with the film Chopper. Bana's depiction of a charismatic killer won him the Australian Film Institute's best actor award. It also brought him to the attention of Hollywood and, in 2001, he starred in Black Hawk Down, alongside Josh Hartnett.

But Bana has been reluctant to make compromises on his way to big-screen success. In fact, he has set himself rules that would, with most aspiring actors, count considerably against them.

He refuses to relocate to Hollywood, and between films he returns to his Melbourne home to have as normal a family life as possible with wife and children, Klaus, four, and Sophia, one. Nor will he consider any new film projects until he's finished the one he's working on, and he insists on making no more than one movie a year.