The Dry star Eric Bana on lockdown, country filming and why he owes his wife big time

Hollywood star Eric Bana reveals why he owes a big part of his career to his wife Rebecca and the challenges of Melbourne’s lockdown after filming The Dry in the bush.

Eric Bana happily admits his wife should get some kind of finder’s fee for the ongoing success of his acting career.

The former stand-up comedian turned Hollywood star married wife Rebecca in 1997 and her voracious reading habits have been an unexpected bonus of a long and happy union that has also brought them two now-adult children, Klaus and Sophie.

Since bursting on the global acting scene with the mesmerising, award-winning title role in Chopper, in addition to starring in action blockbusters such as Black Hawk Down, Hulk, Troy, and Star Trek, Bana has also found a rich vein of material in literary adaptations including The Other Boleyn Girl, The Time Traveller’s Wife, The Secret Scripture, Romulus My Father, and now The Dry.

Eric Bana and wife Rebecca Gleeson attend the Sydney premiere of The Dry last month. Picture: Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

“She should, absolutely,” Bana says with a laugh when asked whether Rebecca cash in on her keen eye.

“I am very indebted to her because I think literally every adaptation except for Black Hawk Down has been a late-night turn over on the pillow saying ‘honey, you have to read this one – this is going to be made into a movie, I can guarantee it’. She tears through them very quickly and has a good eye for it for sure.”

That was certainly the case for The Dry, the new big-screen adaptation of Australian journalist-turned-author Jane Harper’s thriller, with Bana in the lead role of Detective Aaron Falk as well as coming on board as a producer.

By happy coincidence, Bana’s long-time friend and sometime collaborator Robert Connolly was already involved in a project to bring to life the murder mystery — set in the remote and often drought-stricken Mallee Region of Victoria — that was being spearheaded by fellow Aussie Bruna Papandrea, whose recent TV producing successes include Big Little Lies and The Undoing.

Eric Bana and director Robert Connolly share office space in Melbourne and teamed up to make The Dry.

Bana and Connolly met as star and producer of the 2007 Australian film Romulus My Father, and hit it off immediately. When Connolly, director of homegrown hits including The Bank, Balibo and Paper Planes, moved his operation to Melbourne, the pair decided to share an office. They converted two floors of a warehouse into a space featuring a cinema where they could watch films together and, more importantly, somewhere they could bounce ideas off each other, even if they weren’t direct collaborations.

“It’s so hard in this business trying to live a creative life,” says Connolly, who likens their shared premises to a “professional man cave”.

“Filmmaking very quickly becomes an industrial process. I always talk about it as a director, trying to make it feel like you are splashing paint on a canvas – so (it’s great) having a creative space where you can go and hang out and talk about stuff and have other filmmakers coming through.”

Bana says the two also provide emotional support for each other, negotiating the tricky and often unpredictable business.

“It’s cheap counselling,” Bana says. “I get off the phone in a huff and he goes ‘what’s going on, mate?’ and he gets off the phone in a huff and I go ‘what’s going on Rob?’. It works pretty well.”

Eric Bana in a scene from The Dry, which was filmed in Victoria’s Mallee and Wimmera regions.

Both Connolly and Bana immediately saw how Harper’s award-winning novel, which has sold more than a million copies worldwide, could be turned into a film, and after realising they were both fans, recognised that it could be the collaboration they had been long searching for.

Bana says he loved the stoic, quietly-determined character of Falk (“I basically gave him no choice but to cast me”) and having grown up in the bush, Connolly says the remote setting and the country characters were at once familiar to him. Connolly was also drawn to the challenge of adapting a twisting narrative that spans two crimes in two time periods – necessitating older and younger versions of the characters – as well some of the larger issues raised in Harper’s book.

“I loved that Jane Harper is not afraid of making a big Australian story with big themes,” Connolly says. “It has gambling, the difficulties of climate change on regional Australia – it’s not afraid of that stuff, but it’s a really compelling, commercial detective mystery as well.”

Connolly shot The Dry in the Wimmera and Mallee regions, particularly around Warracknabeal, in 2019, at the peak of a crippling drought – that year would go on to become worst year of rainfall on record for the region. Despite the hardships, the locals welcomed the production with open arms, giving them access to buildings, shops and homes and also signing on to be extras.

Jane Harper (centre) on the set of The Dry, the film adaptation of her best-selling novel, stars Eric Bana and Genevieve O’Reilly

Bana recalls filling up his car at a local service station and striking up a conversation with a woman who expressed her gratitude that the production had given the community to focus on apart from the stark realities of no rain, failed harvests and the ongoing spectre of financial ruin.

“She said ‘it’s really great – a lot of people are doing it really tough out here and it means a lot that there is something going on in the town’,” Bana says. “We got talking a bit more and I realised what she was saying – there were some people who were really, really struggling from a mental health perspective and just a bit of a change in atmosphere and scenery and a little bit of activity gave them something else to focus on.”

The Dry was one of many films due for release last year that was pushed back when cinemas were shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. Bana, who makes a habit of jumping on his beloved motorbikes and hitting the road to far-flung corners of the state, says the Melbourne lockdowns affected him acutely last year, all the more for having experienced the big skies and wide open spaces of regional Victoria while filming The Dry.

“I was quite sad to come back to Melbourne at the end of filming in the Mallee and it definitely added to my feeling of uneasiness in the hardcore lockdown that we experienced,” he says.

“I love getting out of town all the time anyway but I think just getting into the rhythms of regional Australia for such a long period of time, it suits my psyche. So, I really felt it.”

The Dry is now showing

Originally published as The Dry star Eric Bana on lockdown, country filming and why he owes his wife big time