Worlds away, when the sun is out, it's a bright April morning in London, two months before The Hulk smashes into theaters and tightens Marvel's stranglehold on non-Wachowski action films. Eric Bana is in town to film his next movie, the historical epic Troy, and he's enjoying what is possibly one of his last anonymous meals. He's alone; his wife and two children will be flying in to join him in a few days, but for now he's preoccupied with turning into Hector of Troy. Growing his hair, growing his beard, taking his horse-riding and sword-fighting lessons. And right now, no one in the Italian cafe has any idea who the brawny, bearded man in the suede jacket is, least of all the tiny, squat woman bringing him his cappuccino. Right now the only people who know Eric Bana are in one of two places: Australia or Hollywood. Those in the former know him as the comedian and television star who found stardom playing a psychopathic antihero in the film Chopper, and those in the latter know him as the man who will be asked to hold up some very large tent poles during the next two years. Soon everyone will know him as Dr. Bruce Banner. (Note: A large deal will not be made here of the fact that Banner and Bana sound so similar. Please direct your conspiracy theories elsewhere.)

Geeks and laymen alike, we all know the Jekyll-and-Hyde legend of the Hulk, whether thanks to comic books or to Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno's schlocky early-'8os TV show. It's the old "mild-mannered but emotionally tortured scientist conducting clandestine genetics research accidentally exposes himself to gamma rays, thereby transforming into emerald-skinned apoplectic mesomorph" routine. And now The Hulk is by all accounts the movie Marvel has been waiting for. What director Ang Lee's vision lacks in former bodybuilders it gains in darkness. Lee, whose Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon placed him squarely in the ranks of the bankable auteurs, has approached the movie as an art film that happens to boast a $120 million budget.

"It's not a regular blockbuster comicbook project," says Lee. "The psychology, the drama of it, is that of a Greek drama. It's an outcry of energy, of injustice, of anger, of questioning man's relationship with the angry gods." Of course, true to Marvel ways, virtually no one gets to see it before it opens on 370 million screens across the solar system. But as we've learned in the fourteen years since Batman, perhaps nothing receives as much prerelease scrutiny as a grand-scale adaptation. So Internet and trade-rag chatter has reached levels that would attract CIA attention; through it all a battle has raged as to whether the project was even worth it. But with so much attention being paid to the movie, the man playing Dr. Banner has gone largely unnoticed. Fine by him.

"I'm viciously determined to live a simple life," Bana says in his Melbourne accent: Oy'm veeshishly detayminned to leeve a seemple loif. "It's a bit of a bummer that one day I might lose a little anonymity. I've never been that enamored of fame. And while it's too easy to say that when The Hulk comes out I won't be able to sit here peacefully, I know the reality of it. And I also know there are real ways to avoid it."

The detachment is fitting: Bana shies away from any big-thing prospects with the weariness of a man who already spent five grueling months last year--and all his time since then--trying to keep from turning into a Very Big Thing.

* * *

Australia's two largest cities are very different from each other. Melbourne, to hear her natives tell it, is a quiet, sexy brunet; Sydney's the girl with the boob job. But once upon a time, thirty-odd years ago, a logistical engineer and a hairdresser settled in the quiet sexy brunet's suburbs. They lived with their two sons behind their hair salon and raised racing greyhounds in their yard. The younger son was quiet, kept to himself, but lived inside his own imagination. He used to stand in the middle of the salon, between opposing walls of mirrors, and stare into the reiterative reflections. Wondering how there were so many of him, all trapped inside. Then, one day, when he was 6 or 7, he shuffled across the living room and exhaled heavily, in imitation of his grandfather. Look! I'm Opa! Hhhhhffffft. The parents thought this was the funniest thing they'd ever seen, and the quiet child took note. That quiet child, who could morph into an old man, went through school impersonating his classmates and teachers, much to the delight of the other classmates and teachers.

But even back then, fame had its side effects. "Sometimes I felt a bit invaded by it," the child says now. "It was a party trick that everyone had access to, but it wasn't reserved for parties. And after a while, you sort of feel invaded by having to do it all the time." The put-upon performer begot a high schooler with no interest in education but a healthy interest in racing cars, which begot a gearhead who was all of a sudden a 22-year-old bartender going nowhere.

A drunken New Year's vow sent him off to America, where he bought a car and drove more than 12,000 miles around the South. An Australian in Dixie, in a Mustang with New York plates; things were bound to happen, and they did, though nothing too hairy. "The fact that I didn't get into any serious trouble was amazing," he says. "There were a few close calls, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting lost at 3 A.M. on a Saturday in Washington, D.C." Then he was back in Melbourne, working at the Castle, a local club. For four hours a week, it was the club, the spot to be in that corner of Australia. But four hours is not enough! said the promotions manager. We're adding standup comedy now. You, he said to the Americatouring bartending gearhead mimic, Get up onstage and do something funny. The America-touring bartending gearhead mimic had never done stand-up and didn't think he'd be funny to strangers who wouldn't appreciate his grandfather impression.

In Australia, though, they call it getting your back up, and that's what he did: got his back up and said, Fuck it, and picked up a microphone and became a stand-up comedian. At least until Full Frontal, Australia's version of Saturday Night Live, came calling a year or so later and put him on the show. And just like that, the America-touring bartending gearhead mimic was finally comfortable. Besides, stand-up was beginning to get annoying.

"At that point, I was still working in a bar part-time and my tolerance for drunk people was becoming very low," Bana says. "The aspiration to do the show wasn't so much about aspiration; it was truly and simply about finding the glove that fit, and it was the only glove.

That meant, above all, not always playing for laughs. Sure, there were the bizarre bugeyed characters with wigs and glasses and redneck ways who would invite John Wayne Bobbit on the show for an "interview" and ask, "So, did ya chuck a spaz when the missus cut yer cock off?" But the quiet child who spent a lot of time inside his head started giving air to the many people he saw trapped in his mother's mirrors, and it was good. Many of them were from a place the happy-go-lucky impressions never quite reached, where pathos and frustration lived. He'd write for his costars just so he could play the straight guy, just so his performance could be something real. Doing those parts made him feel that fit again, that glove thing. And one day, in a prison somewhere, Australia's most famous criminal was watching him on television and thought to himself, He's just fucking crazy enough to play me.

See, Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read had written a series of books about his legendary Robin Hood exploits--robbery, mayhem and murder, famously committed only on other criminals--and his story was becoming a movie. Problem was, after a year of searching, the movie's producers still hadn't found anyone who could pull off the right blend of genius and Visigoth. But then Chopper found them their Chopper. "Thank God the director wasn't very familiar with me from TV," says Bana--and ten grueling audition hours later, the young man got the part.

It was the role of a lifetime, which admittedly doesn't often happen with one's first effort. And Bana's performance is the kind that belongs in the category of Contribution: in this case, to the Evil Genius archetype. Like Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs and Kevin Spacey in Seven, Bana in Chopper reaches through the screen and chills the heart. The movie covers a thirteen-year span in Chopper's life; to play the older, softer Chopper, Bana gained thirty-seven pounds in four weeks. But body transformation is only half the feat; the rest of the star-making turn hinges on a dizzying bipolarity, the jaggy swing between morose sad sack and manic barbarian. Much of that is conveyed through his eyes; brown and large, they flicker in an impassive face with callousness, brilliance.

In one scene, Chopper repeatedly stabs a fellow inmate in the neck, then yells after him as he gets dragged out by medics, "Ah, whinge, whinge, fuckin' whinge." Feckin' whinge. It's the fava-beans-and-Chianti moment of Chopper. Emotive, sure, but never over-the-top. Throughout the movie, Bana's Chopper wages a constant battle with himself, as though everything rides on that line-where a loss of control means total destruction. And as a result, you feel for him.

"There's the Hulk right there," says Lee, who saw Chopper while casting The Hulk. "He's terrifying! It's a mouth-dropping performance, totally intimidating, totally terrifying--the violence, the craziness, the unpredictability." For James Schamus, one of The Hulk's screenwriters, the quality that made Bana so good as both Chopper and Dr. Banner is rooted in his early calling.

I think most comedians have that kind of anger in them," says Schamus. "The baring of teeth that is our smile, as they say, has an evolutionary root in far more aggressive behavior."

Here's the thing: Eric Bana is not a dark man. Never has been. But it takes a lot to inhabit the mind of a killer, and sometimes it takes even more to get out of it. Acting is craft; character is camouflage. Do the clothes ever come all the way off?

"I'd be lying if I said there weren't some kind of residual feelings at different points," says Bana, "but they've never manifested themselves behaviorally. I remember, a couple of months after finishing Chopper, certain thoughts coming into my head and my realizing that, shit, some of the stuff I've been thinking about for six months isn't very healthy. It wasn't until I had that period of separation that I was able to look back on the fact that my state of mind was probably affected more than I'd thought." Darkness finds a home.

* * *

When Chopper came out, in 2000, it played to huge acclaim at the Toronto and Telluride film festivals; intrigued by the film's reception, Hollywood came knocking. But Bana had his limits, and they were steadfast. No romantic comedies, no more television and absolutely no comic-book stuff. Then his agent called with the words that no one thinks he wants to hear: Before you say anything, hear me out. In the stories you hear, the next words always have something to do with robot gladiators or chimpanzee butlers. This time, it was different.

>They're making a movie of The Hulk, the agent said. Ang Lee's directing. No, they haven't asked for you. Yes, it's a long shot. You in? Bana was.

"I knew straightaway it wasn't going to be the standard fare," he says. And after seeing Lee's work, he found it nearly impossible to imagine the man behind The Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility doing typical cape-and-boots material.

"That's what my instinct was," says Bana, "and that's why I really wanted to do it." But before he could even try, he had to finish Black Hawk Down. When the film wrapped, Bana flew to Los Angeles to meet the people at Marvel, and they were stunned. They were casting three movies at the time--The Hulk, Daredevil and Ghost Rider--and they felt he was perfect for all three. Go have lunch with Schamus and Lee, they said.

So an Australian guy, a Taiwanese guy and an American guy walked into a restaurant. They talked about their families for a while; then the Australian guy left, thinking, Well, that's it. No Hulk for me. He called his agent and said he'd had a great time but it wasn't going to happen. Unbeknownst to Bana, back at the restaurant the Taiwanese guy and the American guy knew they finally had their Banner.

"Probably the biggest impression that Eric left on both of us," Schamus remembers, "was just how together this guy was. We didn't spend an enormous amount of time or effort positioning each other about how great our movie was going to be, so he probably walked away a little confused. Our biggest fear, which turned out to be completely unfounded, was whether or not be could be a Bruce Banner as well as be a movie star." Lee was worried that he was too imposing; Schamus was worried that he was too handsome. Still, he had what they needed, and news outlets everywhere reported that some guy no one had ever heard of would be playing the Hulk.

Well, not really. Because as the world knows by now, Lee rolled the dice on an all-or-nothing cinematic gamble: the Hulk, like Gollum and Scooby-Doo before him, is played by software. This device has worked well, as with Gollum, and not so well, as with Mr. Doo. And whether it flies this time will only be known opening weekend. But Bana welcomed the separation.

"It was really a source of relief," he says of The Hulk's receiving the Jurassic Park treatment. "I didn't have any of those icky moments that I potentially could have had if I were running around beating my chest in green paint. I feel protected in some ways."

Protected now, at least, 6,000 miles away from the soundstage where he logged so many dozens of shots per scene. Protected and that's about all. Lee kept the shoot segregated, echoing the main character's schizophrenia by keeping Banner and the Hulk apart at all times. So whereas the Hulk rampaged through special-effects orgies in San Francisco, Bana's scenes were relegated to somber interiors at the Universal lot in Los Angeles. And while much of the movie's action evokes pure Marvel whizbang--primary colors and kinetic framing straight out of a Jack Kirby-illustrated panel--Lee used Banner's ongoing battle with the id that threatens to control him as a launchpad for a stylistic shift.

"There were some cinematic things I wanted to experiment with;' says Lee, "so I'd cover things many ways, differently from how I would usually cover them. So it was a lot of shooting, a lot of cameras. It paid off handsomely, I think, but it might still have been a little strange for the actors."

It was understandably taxing. "Working for Ang," says Avi Arad, CEO of Marvel Studios and a producer of The Hulk, "you have your soul taken apart and put back together. It's about catching the moment, and that's what a good director should do." Bana recognized this but found himself increasingly drained as the shoot progressed.

"There's a natural tendency for us to equate tough with rewarding," he says. "But Ang does make you work very hard; he makes you dig deep, and he doesn't always give you all the answers."

The difficulty, Lee says, is part of the job. "Those are the difficult times, when a director has to choose whether he wants to be a good person or a good director. I have to just keep going and get a better result but be the worse person for it." Meanwhile, the character was proving elusive for Bana. "What are you actually hanging your hat on?" he asks. "It's one thing to convincingly be a scientist, but what is it, essentially, you're trying to tap into? What is going to be the core of that character? And it became about trying to tap into a feeling of being constantly uncomfortable." So for five sticky, claustrophobic months, be was uneasy in his own skin.

* * *

That's all in the past now-the frustration, the darkness. All that's left is the finished product. "I think it will be quite different from what a lot of people are expecting," says Bana. "The way the movie was trailered is a lot different from the film, deliberately. Which I feel good about. It's going to be a lot juicier and a lot more philosophical."

Should the anticipation prove warranted, the film will be the apotheosis of Marvel's triumphs of the past five years-in the shape of an enormous green CGI-fueled child-beast. With a merchandising program comprising 300 licensing agreements, it promises the populist appeal and absolute market saturation of Spider-Man. With the original comic book's longevity and fan base, it carries the built-in hardcore following of X-Men. And with Ang Lee's meticulous touch, it augurs the cinematic credibility of 1998's dark Blade. But what it comes down to is convincing people that they really want to let go. To haul off and unleash the howling wordless maelstrom. To Hulk out.

The filmmaking process nearly took Bana there, which is part of why he's so looking forward to Troy. "I honestly don't think it would be possible for me to feel more convinced and more excited about a project," be says. His third American movie, Troy is even bigger than the first two. Wolfgang Petersen is the man who tamed a one-hundred-foot wave for A Perfect Storm, who made Air Force One and Outbreak; as Troy's director, he knows how to tell a story writ large. And he sees in Bana a man who's as perfect for lightness as he is for the dark.

"He has such a sweetness and kindness about him;' says Petersen, "and an interesting nobility, which is perfect for Hector--a big, heroic man of the sword who would put the sword down if he could. He's not a guy who likes to fight; he does it because he loves his country, he loves his people, loves his family."

Much like Banner. Much like Bana. Peaceful, sane, fighting back the dark.