the real thing; As his star continues its heady rise, Eric Bana remains winningly down-to-earth.

Byline: John Powers

Because of his brooding good looks and a penchant for playing reluctantly violent heroes, it's easy to think that Eric Bana must be a very serious guy. But in fact the 38-year-old Australian star originally made his name as a comedian-and he really enjoys kidding around.

"One trick I love doing," he tells me, "is when I'm on a junket. I put my publicist in the backseat and I sit in the front. When we get to where we're going, I get out first and talk into my jacket." He deftly mimes the mannerisms of a Secret Service agent. "Everyone swarms my publicist, thinking she's the movie star." He laughs. "They don't even notice me."

Bana's chances of disappearing into the background should be much smaller after his new movie, Lucky You, a Las Vegas-based drama in which he stars as Huck Cheever, a hotshot cardplayer torn between his affections for a wannabe singer (Drew Barrymore) and his angry yearning to defeat his overbearing father (Robert Duvall) in the World Series of Poker. It's a groundbreaking role for Bana. Not only is this the first Hollywood movie in which his character doesn't kill anybody ("It's a major breakthrough in my anger-management classes," he jokes), but Huck is his most multifaceted character to date-at once charming and angry, driven and sexy, funny and emotionally lost.

"In a way, Eric is like Huck," says Lucky You's director, Curtis Hanson. "He's a blaster. He does everything full-out. People haven't seen everything he can do yet."

Not that Bana's talents have gone unappreciated. After becoming famous as a TV sketch comic on the Australian equivalent of Saturday Night Live, he took the lead in Chopper (2000), a rollickingly brutal biopic about the notorious Australian murderer Mark Read. Bana's performance was a revelation, a star turn so scary and exuberant that he was soon snapped up by a Who's Who of Hollywood directors for a series of ambitious movies: Ridley Scott (Black Hawk Down), Ang Lee (The Hulk), Wolfgang Petersen (Troy), Steven Spielberg (Munich), and Lucky You's Hanson. And the plum roles keep coming: He's set to play Henry VIII opposite Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson in Justin Chadwick's The Other Boleyn Girl.

What Bana brings to the table is more than the slow-burn intensity that made him so dangerously compelling in Munich. "He's like the old-time movie stars," says Hanson. "He's grounded in an adult way. He loves his home, his family, his motorcycles and cars. He's a man." Indeed, Bana is yet another in a long line of stars from Down Under-Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Heath Ledger-who bring a toughness to the screen missing in so many American actors. Photograph him in a Hummer on the beach with Gisele, and he seems right at home.