Australian actor Eric Bana is far from ubiquitous, preferring as he does to pick and choose his movies to maximise his time with his young family. Yet his currency is rising. Following Chopper, Black Hawk Down, Troy and Ang Lee's Hulk, Bana is back on the big screen as the leader of an Israeli hit squad in Steven Spielberg's Munich. He talks to Donald Clarke about a movie that is causing controversy across the political divide

SHAMBLING wearily out of Munich, I couldn't have felt more miserable if I had spent the previous three hours gargling raw offal to the accompaniment of Leonard Cohen. Steven Spielberg should take this as a compliment. Following the efforts of agents from Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to eliminate the Palestinian terrorists who murdered 11 athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Spielberg's film could easily have taken on the quality of propaganda. As it transpires, this long, tense thriller has managed to equally enrage members of the Israeli and Arab lobbies in the United States. Rather than arguing the case for either side, Spielberg focuses on the dehumanising effect that acts of violence have on the perpetrator. Numberless, increasingly brutal killings mount up, leaving the viewer battered, dazed and, ultimately, rather sickened.

The sense of desolation is heightened by a characteristically intense performance from Eric Bana as the leader of the Mossad hit squad.

Tall and dark with sad eyes, the Australian actor does a very good line in haggard solemnity. He managed to be even more dejected than the perennially crestfallen Jennifer Connelly in Hulk. He was statuesque - and the only actor under 40 to bolster his reputation - in Wolfgang Petersen's colossal Punch and Judy show, Troy. He was one of several stars who proved impossible to identify amid the rubble and noise of the grim Black Hawk Down. With these performances in mind, it is startling to recall that Bana began his career as a comedian. This is like discovering that Jim Carrey started out in tableau vivante.

"Yeah that's right," he says. "And everything I've done since is so bloody miserable. Mind you, if you think this is miserable you should try stand-up. Then you would know what misery is."

Eric Banadinovich was born 37 years ago in suburban Melbourne. His mother was a hairdresser and his father, a Croatian, worked in the logistics department of the Caterpillar tractor manufacturers.

Eric's main enthusiasm as a youth was cars and he is convinced that, if he hadn't become aware of a talent for performance, he would probably have ended up tinkering with engines for a living. "Yeah. I would have known nothing else. I would have done an apprenticeship and just become a mechanic or an engineer or something." As things worked out, he soon discovered a gift for mimicry and, like many comics before him, realised that the power to make others laugh could be used as a means of defence in the playground.

"I wanted be an actor ever since," he says. "I had no idea how to go about it. I kind of stumbled into comedy because my friends persuaded me it was the way to go. I had always liked comedy, but my heroes had been Richard Pryor and Dame Edna Everage: character-based stuff. I got involved with sketch comedy and then did some stand-up until I got sick of it."

In 1993 Bana joined the company of Full Frontal, a TV sketch show, and three years later secured his own series, Eric. In 1997 he took a small role in the rambunctious comedy film, The Castle, but it was his performance in 2000's Chopper that announced Bana's talent to the world. Andrew Dominik's extraordinary picture - horrific and blackly comic by turns - tells the true story of Mark Brandon Read, a bluff Australian hoodlum, as likely to buy you a beer as sever one of your extremities.

"Never has a film that made so little money been seen by so many people," he laughs. "It was the smallest film in the history of the world, but I have never met anybody who hasn't seen it."

Chopper Read himself felt that Bana was perfect for the role and the two men met up several times while the actor was preparing. It was an unusual piece of casting, not least because Read is a monstrously large individual. Observing the Robert De Niro big-belly diet, the hitherto stringy actor pigged out on carbohydrates to get himself up to the required mass. Read was, apparently, delighted with the final result. What did Eric make of him? "Oh I got a real sense of how draining it must be to be around someone like that all the time," he says. "He just consumes any room that he enters and that is a very important part of his presence. He is an extraordinarily intimidating person to be around."

Chopper did not make a huge amount of money, but Bana's performance attracted a great deal of attention in Hollywood. Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of all things leading to tinnitus, was a particular fan and lured the Australian into the cast of Black Hawk Down. Bana, who is married to Rebecca Gleeson, once a publicist on his TV show, elected to work on only one film a year, so that he might spend time with his young family in Australia. As a result, his career has progressed steadily rather than soaring meteorically.

Hulk, Ang Lee's adaptation of the great Marvel comic book, was supposed to break Eric into the super-league, but the film, though fascinating, proved a little too eccentric to attract the expected multitudes. Last month Lee, now enjoying acclaim for Brokeback Mountain, told me just how stressed he had become while making his first blockbuster. Ang still quivers a little when saying the film's name.

"I can see that it was not the most enjoyable project for him," Bana says. "He was under a lot of pressure. I hope he is happy with the end product. I think he is. It is a good movie and he is to be congratulated for what he did. It was almost beyond genre and it suffered from having this absurd weight of expectation on it."

Early figures from the United States suggest that Munich, a difficult, murky film, may, despite the efforts of a populist director, not prove a mainstream hit either. But the editorials keep flowing. Supporters of the Palestinian cause have objected to the very notion of having a Mossad hitman as the film's protagonist. Meanwhile some in the Israeli lobby have whinged that the picture humanises the Arab terrorists and implies some sort of moral equivalence between the actions of Mossad and those of the so-called Black September group, which carried out the Olympic attack.

No surprises there. In an era where a film such as The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie can attract the attention of the recreationally outraged, a movie detailing responses to terrorism was bound to inflame all kinds of passions.

"Oh yeah," Bana agrees. "In America now every romantic comedy is interpreted politically. You just can't avoid that now. I can remember when I was promoting Black Hawk Down we were all being asked what it said about September 11th. Well, it was shot before that happened, so, nothing."

Well, yes. But, to be fair, Spielberg's final shot (we are giving no plot points away here) does allude directly to the traumas of the last five years. As the credits roll, the camera inclines itself towards lower Manhattan where, the film being set in the mid-1970s, the newly-erected World Trade Centre stands proud. What do we have here? A reminder of the sort of atrocity that makes retribution inevitable and desirable? Unlikely from Hollywood liberals. A suggestion that cycles of violence tend to escalate and precipitate ever greater tragedies? More probable, I think.

"It is a really clever, gentle reminder," Bana says. "Here we are in the early to mid-1970s and in the background are the twin towers. It is a subtle suggestion: we think we are moving forward, but are we really? In time the towers are not going to be there and this cycle of violence is going to continue until it touches the audience in the cinema. It prevents us from viewing the events at arm's length."

Much of the controversy has focused on the accuracy of the script. Munich is adapted by Eric Roth and Tony Kushner from George Jonas's book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team.

Jonas's main source was one Juval Aviv, who claims to have been the leader of the Mossad team. Understandably enough Bana, whose fictionalised character is named Avner, is cautious about revealing too many details concerning whom he approached while researching.

"The character is very loosely based on a real person," he says. "I met him and I garnered a lot of information. Some of that has made its way into the movie. Some has not. That meeting was really beneficial. I was not taking on any physical characteristics; it is more just about what was going on in his head. Both Steven and I had great license to create a character."

So, what are the former agent's feelings about what his team got up to? In the film Avner eventually becomes sickened and disillusioned by his mission. "That was the most interesting part of our conversation. But, for obvious reasons, I wouldn't feel able to divulge what his feelings were. But it gave me a very useful insight."

Spielberg, whose War of the Worlds opened last summer, had always made it clear that he intended to have Munich in American cinemas before Christmas. Reports have suggested that the director and his team were still banging the thing together when the carol singers were clearing their throats.

"The shooting always felt fast," Bana agrees. "But that was mainly because I hadn't worked with Spielberg before. You get on his team and then you see how it is done. He cuts the film as he goes. He is always impressively aware of where he is during the shoot. He will suddenly turn up and say: 'I have just cut the action scene together.' This will be something he only shot two days previously. So I wasn't all that surprised that it got finished on time."

The studio's strategy was to get Munich out in time for the awards season. Unhappily, despite being the favourite for the Best Picture Oscar before its release, the film has so far performed sluggishly in preliminary gong fests. Spielberg is up for awards from the Directors' Guild of America and was nominated for a Golden Globe (which he didn't win), but, at time of writing, poor old Eric was still waiting for a nod. Mind you, I suspect he cares little for such fripperies. If he were concerned with shimmying up Hollywood's greasy pole he would surely have moved to California and sought work more often than once a year.

"It's stupidity really," he laughs. "I only say stupidity because staying in Australia is the impractical choice. It's not because I dislike LA; I have a great time when I am there. But home is home and that has helped me. There is no doubt that I make all my best decisions there. I could have done 20 films by now, but I like to be able to not work when I don't have to." So if he encountered a young actor who had just married and wanted to stay that way, would he recommend living far away from Hollywood's temptations? "Well we are married eight years and that is a lifetime in this business," he says.

"You have to have a home. I can't relate to not having one. I know some actors don't. You have to have a base of some kind, a place where the phone doesn't ring. My wife and family travel to every film I have done. That may change as the children get older. Hey, you think I don't work much now, wait till you see how little I work in the future."

Enjoy him while you can.

Munich is released next Friday