Bana keen to play the villain
Presented with the chance to play either a troubled ex-boxer eager for redemption or a volatile psycho-killer with a hair-trigger temper, Aussie actor Eric Bana saw little choice at all.
He leaped at the opportunity to let loose as the volatile villain in Deadfall, a robber named Addison whose crime spree reaches its apex in a tense Thanksgiving day standoff with Jay, the fallen fighter.
Bana’s agent thought he’d prefer the more sympathetic character but Bana says he was drawn to Addison’s dangerous complexities.
“It was the most interestingly written character as far as I was concerned,” Bana says in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles.
“It was really well-written and very descriptive and I actually found it quite humorous as well. In a sort of twisted way,” adds Bana, who adopted a deep southern U.S. drawl for the part.
The story follows Addison and his younger sister Liza as they scramble toward the Canadian border in the wake of a botched casino heist. They are forced to split up and proceed on foot just as a blizzard descends — creating near-whiteout conditions that provide a stark visual backdrop as each sibling entangles unwitting bystanders in their escape.
Bana, whose diverse credits include playing a tortured super-hero in Hulk, an idealistic Mossad agent in Munich and a loopy rugby fanatic in Funny People, relished the chance to explore a monstrous mind.
“When you’ve got a character like Addison who has an internal kind of moral compass that’s unflinching, I think that always makes those characters a bit scarier because you know that you can’t reason with them and that they have total conviction in the fact that what they’re doing is the right thing,” he says.
Addison’s only alliance is to his fragile sister Liza, played by Olivia Wilde. Their disturbingly tight bond hints at a sinister family history that is intentionally left vague.
“That was gloriously ambiguous and (director) Stefan (Ruzowitzky) was great,” Bana says of the Austrian filmmaker, who won a foreignlanguage film Oscar for 2007’s The Counterfeiters.
“He basically told Olivia and I to make up our own version of our backstory and not discuss it with each other, which kind of made it a bit creepier and kind of more interesting in a way. ”
Although Bana played a similarly demented ex-con in the 2001 Australian film Chopper, he admits that Addison is much darker than his more recent Hollywood roles.
“I’ve been lucky enough to be able to jump around a bit and haven’t been grossly pigeonholed, which has been nice but also a kind of conscious thing,” he says.
Deadfall opens in Toronto, Calgary and Montreal on Friday.