‘A lot of wacky stuff goes on’: Eric Bana goes wild, again, for Netflix murder mystery

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A brooding cop, troubled by his past. Stunning wilderness. Long-held secrets in a tight-knit community. A murder investigation. Eric Bana.

Share these details with an Identikit artist, and you’ll probably get something that looks like The Dry, or its sequel Force of Nature, the Australian feature films in which Bana starred as Jane Harper’s detective Aaron Falk.

But that, insists the 56-year-old whose star turn on the other side of the law as Chopper Read is now, remarkably, 25 years old, would be wide of the mark.

“I just love working outdoors. It’s been a pretty consistent theme, that I’m always drawn to big outdoor shows,” he says. “But I don’t think they have too much in common after that.”

In Netflix’s six-part crime series Untamed, Bana plays Kyle Turner, a detective with the Investigative Services Branch. “It’s kind of like the FBI of the National Park Service,” he explains of the real-life ISB. “There aren’t that many of them [investigators], and they move around from park to park, depending on the workload.”

Set in Yosemite National Park in California, the series was actually shot in Whistler, Canada.

Kyle is based in Yosemite, where he’s lived for years. His ex-wife Jill lives nearby, and though she has repartnered, they are bound – not especially healthily – by trauma. Neither of them can, or will, move on.

When a young woman drops to her death from a cliff (almost collecting a couple of climbers along the way, in one of the more spectacular opening sequences in recent memory), Kyle suspects foul play rather than an accident. Soon, he realises the dead woman is linked to a case he had investigated many years earlier, and that the sprawling wilderness he holds dear also hides a whole range of nefarious activities besides illegal campfires.

Bana, with Lily Santiago as National Parks police officer Naya Vasquez, spent a lot of time on horseback for the series.

The spark for the show was lit when screenwriter Mark L. Smith read an article about a real-life crime in a park, and the ISB investigation that followed. “And it was just like, ‘We haven’t seen this on film before, a murder mystery thriller investigation in a national park’,” Bana says. “That’s where the idea began, and then he just started fleshing it out. ‘Well, who would this person be?’

“He’s not based on a real character,” he hastens to add of Kyle. “It was just the germ of the idea.”

Bana is a producer as well as star of the series, and as it was in development, a real-life story was unfolding in the Australian wilderness – the so-called High Country Murders of Russell Hill and Carol Clay, for which former Jetstar pilot Greg Lynn was ultimately convicted.

For Bana, that duality of the remote wilderness was part of the appeal of the Untamed story.

“A lot of wacky stuff goes on, and that plays into the psyche,” he says. “Even if you love the outdoors, there’s the element that you always feel a little bit exposed.”

There’s the natural aspect – which, in Australia, often means the threat of bushfire or flooding or extreme heat or cold, or simply wandering off track and becoming hopelessly lost. “But then there’s also that thing of, well, what if there’s someone else out here? What about the humans, you know? So on a subconscious level, I think everyone relates to that, and we definitely were trying to tap into that.”

Abseiling off a cliff was all in a day’s work for Eric Bana in Untamed.

Bana read a script for the first episode in 2018, and was immediately onboard. But it took years to get it made. Why the delay?

“COVID, strikes, trends, quality, making sure we had everything right. Just all the normal things – and the abnormal ones. I’ve lived with Kyle for a long, long time, probably one of the longest gestation periods I’ve had for a character.”

ISB officers generally “don’t work as part of a massive team, and they are often highly skilled in their particular areas, used to working alone”, Bana says. And Kyle has that lone-wolf vibe dialled up to 11. Basically, he just doesn’t like people very much, himself included.

Though the park is a major character too, the series was actually shot in Canada’s Whistler, which Bana had previously visited on skiing holidays with his wife and kids a couple of times, but had never seen in the warmer months. “In the middle of summer you can’t get into Yosemite because of the tourists, and the restrictions,” he says. “We just had more freedom of movement in British Columbia.”

Though they’ve both been acting in the US and Australia for decades, Bana (right) and Sam Neill (left) had never worked together before.

For Bana, much of that movement was done on the back of a horse. He first learnt to ride for Troy, more than 20 years ago. “That was a pretty intensive training period because we were bareback, no stirrups for that film. So from there, everything’s pretty easy afterwards.”

Sometimes he’d get to set in the backwoods by car, sometimes by chairlift. And on one memorable day, he and co-star Sam Neill rode their horses to location.

“They weren’t in the scene, we were just using them as transpo,” he says of their trusty steeds. “He’s not even on camera today, my guy, but I’m using his saddlebag for packing some stuff. You’d just pinch yourself every day you were up on a horse on top of a mountain somewhere at the back of Whistler, and realise it was actually a job. It’s just amazing.”

Untamed marks Bana’s second TV series out of the States, following Dirty John (based on the true-crime podcast) in 2018. Those with long memories will recall that he got his start as part of the cast of sketch-comedy show Full Frontal in the mid-1990s, had a brief eponymous solo show, Eric, from 1996, and played Joe Sabatini in the ABC’s weeknight serial Something in the Air in the early 2000s. But post-Chopper, he has almost exclusively been a movie actor.

Untamed doesn’t represent a major shift, he insists.

“It doesn’t feel that different. I mean, there are some days when you feel like, ‘OK, we’re really having to go quickly’, but generally, there’s not a huge difference between making a TV show and making a movie.

Rosemarie DeWitt plays Kyle’s ex-wife Jill.

”On Dirty John, we had one director over the eight episodes, so that just felt like a big film. This, because I worked so closely with [creators] Mark and Elle, felt like a big film shoot, with three directors. It was amazing and incredible to work on and to put together an incredible cast for this.”

That includes Rosemarie DeWitt (Mad Men, United States of Tara, The Boys) as Kyle’s ex-wife, Jill, and Lily Santiago (La Brea) as Kyle’s offsider Naya Vasquez. And, of course, it includes Sam Neill, aka The Prop (see the NZ actor and winemaker’s prolific social media output for further detail).

“Sam Neill’s a legend,” Bana proclaims happily. But, remarkably, this was the first time the pair had ever worked together.

In fact, he adds, “We’d never even met prior to this project, ever been in the same room.

“We have mutual friends, and the first day we met, we’re both like, ‘How is this possible?’

“He said, ‘I feel like I’ve known you my whole life’. And I said, ‘I feel the same’.”

Of course, they got on like a house on fire. And, of course, Neill brought out a few bottles of his Two Paddocks pinot noir at the end of long shooting days. “Absolutely, my word. He wasn’t getting away from the job without some of that,” Bana says.

But tell me, Eric – did he open the really good stuff, his top-of-the-line Fusilier, or First Paddock offerings?

“Oh,” Bana says with a laugh. “I’m going to have to go through my picture library this afternoon and find out just how close a friend I am.”

Untamed is now streaming on Netflix.

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