Rebecca Bana /Trunk Archive.Com
Rebecca Bana /Trunk Archive.Com
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September 17, 2019
Features

In Charm's Way

For his first U.S. TV series, Aussie film star Eric Bana took on Bravo’s Dirty John, playing an ex-con who woos and dupes a beautiful businesswoman. “Eric’s so charming,” says director Jeffrey Reiner, “but can also play evil.”

Margy Rochlin

It's been about 20 years since Eric Bana ended the first phase of his entertainment career — he was a popular stand-up and sketch comedian in Australia — but his brain doesn't know that. For the past hour or so, he's been eating lunch in the restaurant at the Viceroy L'Ermitage Beverly Hills, silently keeping notes on a server who remains oblivious to his waving hand.

"I still see the world in terms of possible sketches," he says with a laugh, as his hopes of ordering a cappuccino dwindle. Though the server is just a few feet away, meandering slowly toward the back of the tiny, almost deserted restaurant, he remains unaware of the six-foot-two-inch movie star's attempts to get his attention.

It was Bana's comedy roots that made Bravo's Dirty John interesting to him. Based on the popular 2017 true-crime podcast of the same name, the show began as an investigative series in the Los Angeles Times by journalist Christopher Goffard. In the eight-episode cable series, his first-ever stab at American television, Bana plays real-life con man John Meehan.

"The movie thing has always suited me," says Bana, who loved how a limited series is similar to a film: he can give 100 percent and then, after four or five months, head back home to Melbourne to be with his wife and two kids. "I'm kind of the opposite of an actor who really panics about not being [employed]," he says. "I'm a commitment-phobe."

What drew Bana in was the complexity of his sinister role. Meehan was a two-bit ex-convict who, in passing himself off as a gallant freelance anesthesiologist and Iraq War vet, managed to woo, marry and defraud a successful Orange County businesswoman named Debra Newell (played by Connie Britton in the series).

"What he did was interesting, intriguing," Bana says of a part that required him to shift constantly between ingratiating, shady, doting, frightening and bumbling. "But aside from his behavior, he was pretty pathetic. He was almost like a failed wannabe bad guy," Bana says. "Some of the things that would come out of his mouth didn't even make sense. It just sounds like someone reading a really bad script."

Jeffrey Reiner (The Affair) — the sole director on Dirty John and also, like Bana and Britton, an executive producer — says he thought Bana was the perfect actor to play Meehan. They needed someone audiences would initially find attractive — the tall, athletic answer to a lonely quadruple-divorcée's dreams.

"We had to start at ground zero with somebody who is innately likable, someone you feel that she'd fall for — and Eric is so charming, just a really beautiful person inside," Reiner says. He knew from Bana's feature film debut as a tattooed criminal in Chopper that he'd have no trouble communicating Meehan's dark side with a single, murderous glance.

"Eric just checked [all the boxes]: he's charming, handsome, but could also play evil. In the podcast, this lawyer named John Dzialo says that his eyes could be black as coal. In the scene when Eric just stares him down? His eyes were as black as coal."

Dirty John showrunner Alexandra Cunningham (Desperate Housewives) says she's such a big Bana fan that she almost offered him the lead of her last series, Hulu's Chance. When she started compiling her actor wish list for this show, she instantly thought, "I'm really going to go for it this time. This is the person I want to throw it all at and hope that it works."

The good news was that, after listening to the Dirty John podcast, Bana happened to be flying to Los Angeles to do publicity for his role as a convicted assassin in the Roland Joffé thriller The Forgiven. The less-good news was that, despite having landed a straight-to-series deal with Bravo, Cunningham had no pilot script to share at their meeting.

So she fielded a torrent of questions instead. "He asked, 'What's the framework of the series going to be?' 'How true to the podcast is it going to be?' 'How are you going to put flesh on the bones of it?'"

What might have lured Bana aboard was this promise: "The [man] that you will get to play is a grifter who is constantly putting on different characters," she remembers saying. "So I'm going to try to get as close as I can to writing you a role that will give you the opportunity to play everything." Kind of like… sketch comedy.

When the first three episodes were sent to TV critics, reviews vacillated from compelling to soapy. But Bana's laudatory notices indicate Cunningham kept her promise.

"Bana sheds John's genial demeanor like a snake slipping its skin," wrote Entertainment Weekly's Kristen Baldwin. "If this performance does not free him from a career purgatory of forgettable movies — hire him, Peak TV gods! — it will be a crime."

As much as Bana delighted in Meehan's rapid-fire shapeshifting, the show's far-flung locations — Las Vegas plus Long Beach, Lancaster and Orange County, California — offered another upside. "We were never in the same place for more than two minutes," says Bana, who rejected the usual chauffeured SUV and rented his own wheels instead, so he could drive to set.

"I was in my car driving for hours in all directions every day," he says. "Selfishly, I've come to an age where I thought, 'This works for me to drive myself. I'm going to arrive fresher, better prepared and I'm going to get more sleep. I am not going to beat myself up for having not entertained the driver enough on the way to work. I can just be in my own thought.' Engaging with all the drivers on the freeway? It's kind of an adrenaline kick."

According to Reiner, Bana also used his freeway time like a verbal postcard. "He told me he'd call his wife on the way home," Reiner says. "But I also think driving really centers him."

This logic — why be coddled when I can learn the streets of a new city? — is 100 percent Bana, who still lives in Melbourne, where he was born and raised, and who calls working on his fleet of cars ("I have less than 10," is all he'll offer) a form of meditation.

The child of a Croatian father and a German mother, Eric Banadinovic has been tinkering with the same 1974 Ford Falcon XB coupe, dubbed "The Beast," since he was 16. He understands why his kids — Klaus, 19, and Sophia, 16 — aren't interested in cars and prefer Uber: "When you break it down from their perspective, petrol is expensive," he says. "Parking is expensive. You can't drink. Where's the fun?"

But when he was growing up, it took an hour to pedal his BMX bike to a friend's house on the other side of his vast, semi-industrial neighborhood, so he couldn't wait to get his driver's license.

In his early 20s, he took a year off, flew to New York, bought a '77 Mustang hatchback for $750 and spent the next six months discovering America. Upon his eventual return, he landed a job as a "very chatty" bartender. One day a promoter friend, noticing Bana's gift for mimicry, told him, "You're wasting your time as a bartender — you should try stand-up comedy."

Soon, he'd pieced together a comedy career using the same map-free, organic approach he'd applied to his driving tour of the United States. "I didn't have a huge grand plan," Bana says. "I was just literally finding my way. Before I knew it, I was going from open mic to the first slot, then I was on the road supporting people, then I was a headliner, then I went sideways and started working in television sketch comedy."

The four seasons Bana spent on Full Frontal (1993–97) not only made him a household name; they led him to photographer Rebecca Gleeson, who's now his wife and closest adviser. By 1997, Bana was starring in his own sketch comedy series, The Eric Bana Show Live.

For years, he'd been studying colleagues who came not from comedy but from the stage, and he decided there were more similarities than differences between dramatic acting and high-quality sketch work.

"Arrogantly, I thought, 'There's no black magic here, no witchcraft. I don't think it's such a huge leap,'" says Bana, who from 2000 to 2001 played the temperamental Joe Sabatini on an Australian soap opera called Something in the Air.

The way the story goes, after seeing Bana in Full Frontal, convicted murderer and gang member Mark "Chopper" Read suggested Bana play him in Chopper, a big-screen Aussie crime drama based on Read's semi-autobiographical crime novels. Chopper prompted Roger Ebert to predict Bana's future stardom.

Even so, Bana says it was because he lived almost 8,000 miles from Hollywood that he managed to transition from getting laughs to stealing scenes in movies by prestige directors such as Ridley Scott (who cast him in Black Hawk Down), Ang Lee (Hulk) and Steven Spielberg (Munich).

"If I had grown up here, I'd have seen way too many obstacles," he says. "I'd have seen way too many reasons that it wouldn't have worked. There's not a lot of people who come out of something like Saturday Night Live and then get to re-jig the public's perception of what they do."

These days, Bana is viewed as a highly focused actor who's liable to bursts of mood-lightening distraction.

"It's funny, somebody had told me, 'Oh, he's really method,' and he's not that, either," Connie Britton says. "When we were not doing super-serious stuff, he was very funny and goofy. One of the things that I found particularly hilarious and bizarre is that he's a great mimic, but specifically at mimicking electronic and mechanical sounds. It makes sense: he's a huge car fanatic.

"I thought, 'Maybe he can literally talk to the cars.' I'm like, 'Wait, are you imitating the refrigerator in the room right now? Is that really what's happening?'"

If Britton spent a lot of time quizzing the real Debra Newell, Bana gave her a wide berth. "I hope she's happy with the show," he says, "and that it's an experience that helps her move in a positive direction."

He relied on whatever he could mine about John from the podcast and stuck to his initial sense: that he wasn't a world-class mastermind, just a broad-shouldered drug addict who used Match.com to scout for potential marks, and who was adept at spinning outsized tales.

"I don't think he really knew what he was doing; there didn't seem to be a master plan," Bana says. "There wasn't a schematic on the wall somewhere. It was all kind of sad, really."

Bana eventually gets his cappuccino. In a few days he'll return to Melbourne, where he'll be reunited with his family and his cars. Back in Australia he's due to start shooting The Dry, a film based on Jane Harper's best-selling Australian mystery novel. But for now, it's time to get the check.

He raises his hand and waves, but the server just wanders past. Bana's eyes follow. "I miss sketch comedy writing," he says wistfully.


Dirty John is available on DVD as well as Amazon and iTunes. NBCUniversal recently announced that the anthology series will move from Bravo to USA Network for its second season.


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, issue No. 7, 2019

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