A be-mulletted Eric Bana has some very useful advice for aspiring Olympic athletes

Before he played Nero the evil Romulan, the Hulk, and other dramatic roles in gut-wrenching movies like Munich and Black Hawk Down, Eric Bana put on silly wigs and did impressions as part of his actual, full-fledged comedy career. The only time he's come close to doing a comedy film was Funny People, which is only about comedy. We have yet to see Bana show off his chops, but in the meantime, we have this sketch from the Australian show he was on in the '90s, Full Frontal. It's even Olympic-themed! "Horsey!"

Happy Banaversary [The Hairpin]

When she isn't nerding out that the holidays are coming, Jamie is a reader at Monday Night Fan Fiction at Fontana's in Chinatown, NYC (next date: TBA, 7:00 PM). All work is original, written by the readers, so if you have a brilliant fanfic idea stuck in your head, send it via Twitter: @jamielikesthis

MORE: Eric Bana • olympics • sketch comedy

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http://www.facebook.com/pmears Paul Mears

Eric bana was also in the Australian comedy film The castle…. tell em they’re dreaming!
- http://theladyfingers.blogspot.com/ Ladyfingers
  
  Anybody who hasn’t seen The Castle is bad people.
RadioSilence

He was hilarious in Chopper. Well, apart from all the killing and maiming and being a general sociopath that is.
- Paul Renault
  
  Chopper on the Winter Olympics…:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbRhtE2csOo
  
  /thanks for the reminder, I wasted an hour going through all of ‘em again.
  //NSFW, natch.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  One of my favorite romantic comedies.
- ImmutableMichael
  
  Funny – all I can remember is the speed scene, and now I’m wondering what it would sound like with “Yakety Sax”.
- http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith
  
  The real chop lives just down the road from me so I am not commenting on that sociopath idea until he actually dies.
  - RadioSilence
    
    Just in case the real chopper is reading this, I want to be clear that I think the character of ‘chopper’, as portrayed by Eric Bana, is a general sociopath ;)
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      I’ve been very careful in my review of Chopper on several film sites to point out what a lovely gentleman the real life Mark Read is. And I live in the US.
StunGod

You’ve never seen The Castle then. One of my all-time favorite movies, and definitely a comedy. I couldn’t watch Star Trek without thinking of Nero explaining about how your hair gets dehydrated during airplane flights. “It loses its moisture.”
- http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith
  
  To me it just looked like it was made on the petty cash budget from Frontline.
http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney

You should see Paul Hunt’s comedy gymnastics routines as well, they’re hysterical:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu-YAMiS5wA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO_BnsrWMnI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBPjhB9d3jc
Brainspore

Holy crap, I spent a year in Sydney back in ’98 and used to watch that show from time to time. I bet I saw him do that goofy act a dozen times but never made the connection to his later work.
Allen Boxer

I’m just glad you said ‘impression’ not ‘impersonation’.
Adam Brown

The Castle is a great slice of Australian life. Eric has another great line in it, where his character is amazed at a foreign TV channel, “kickboxing 24 hours a day!!!!”
mehennui

Poida!!
Jason Holland

I was quite young when Full Frontal was on, and I only remember watching it as it phased into Fast Forward. Good times.

Can’t remember much of the gags, but the Ray Martin impression that Eric did seems to stick with me the most.
http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi

A few people have pointed out The Castle, but everyone seems to have missed Hulk, if that wasn’t a comedy I’m not sure what it was.
http://profile.yahoo.com/AS6PMQ3IPCHVPBWT27OFWQG5LA tim

He was also the main actor in a comedy called The Nugget.
- http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
  
  Great little flick : )
  - rachel612
    
    oh, no it wasn’t :(
    - http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
      
      From the IMDB page:
      
      The humour may be lost on non-Australians and maybe even on those Australians who haven’t spent much time outside of inner Sydney or Melbourne.
      
      Does that apply?
http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y111/Kimmo666/forum%20pics/Poidaswoit.jpg

It’d be fucken swoit if Bana won an Oscar and accepted it as Poida… that’d be such a cool shout-out to Aussies : )

Folks seem to think he didn’t do much apart from comedy before films – eg these two blog entries: Dool, Ustralian (have a squiz at the first vid at the second one) – but since I watched ABC, I was more familiar with his acting than his comedy; he had a long stint in a (quite good) soapie called Something in the Air.

While watching that, I realised, this dude can really act.
Vincent Bade

If you want an insight in to this man, and the Aussie male in general you have to check out “Love the Beast” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmkpsQmsRpI