It would be a mistake to say Australian actor Eric Bana is an experienced action star. True, he did play "The Hulk" last year, but the action scenes were done by a green-skinned, computer-generated alter ego.

That's not case with "Troy." Bana plays Hector, the besieged city's greatest warrior, who leads assaults against the invading Greeks and meets the enemy's most formidable fighter, Achilles (played by Brad Pitt), in one of the most legendary grudge matches of all time.

"It was really, pleasantly intense," Bana says. "I had a very, very long preparation period for the film physically, and they developed a unique fighting style that they wanted Brad and I to have that was different to each other.

"What's really cool about it is that there are no special effects," says the actor, who notes that CG was mainly reserved for wide-canvas battle shots and the 1,000-ship Greek fleet. "It's just two guys who have trained for a really long period of time trying to do everything themselves. That makes it a very human fight at the same time, which is something that Brad and I are very proud of."

Not that the job was all physical. Caught between loyalty to his own people and his brother Paris (Orlando Bloom), who triggered the war by running off with Spartan queen Helen (newcomer Diane Kruger), Hector understands that he's fighting both a wrong and losing battle.

"I really enjoyed his predicament," Bana says. "Everyone else seems to be going full-speed in their own particular direction, and Hector is one of the only ones that I viewed as having any sense of reason. Even though he's also heading on a course of action, it's largely due to stuff that's happening around him, and there are things that he can foresee but he can't change."

Speaking of change, "Troy" isn't exactly your grandfather's "Iliad." The many differences between Homer and David Benioff's script should only prove a problem for purists, though.

"You're talking about a script that obviously has a lot of action, a lot of characters and a lot of story," Bana notes. "But the draft I first read, I never once had to backtrack, never had to go back three pages to get my head around, ‘Who is this Agamemnon guy?' or ‘Why is Hector doing that?' It's written in this incredibly linear way, even though it encompasses all that it encompasses."