Before actor Joel Edgerton began shooting the brutal mixed martial arts film Warrior, he trained alongside one of Australia's most successful UFC exports, Kyle Noke, for a week.

Noke, the 31-year-old former rugby league player who became Steve Irwin's bodyguard, showed Edgerton around his training base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, before drilling him in the gym.

''We took him to do some hill sprints at altitude, at 13,000 feet [3900 metres], where we did our hill sprints,'' Noke says with a grin. ''He's an awesome guy, I met him and found he was very down to earth.'' Hill sprints will do that to a man.

Edgerton and co-star Frank Grillo, who plays Edgerton's trainer in the critically-acclaimed film, shadowed fighters at Noke's gym and a few landed cameo roles.

Noke was impressed with Edgerton's fighting skills and loved the film.

''I thought it was great, he did a great job,'' Noke says. ''Especially as a fighter, a lot of us guys don't like fighting in movies about MMA because they're so cliched.

''The tough guy gets in there and has to fight to earn money for his family - which this one was in part, but it had a really good back story.''

Noke's back story is just as interesting, if oft-repeated. Born in Dubbo, moved to the Sunshine Coast by his mother, early school-leaver and a fledgling career in rugby league with the Kawana Dolphins before finding MMA.

''In the off-season I was looking for something to do to keep fit and a friend dragged me along to a mixed martial arts class and the rest is history, I just didn't look back,'' he says.

That was 2002. At one point the late Steve Irwin spotted him fighting and asked Noke to work for his family as a bodyguard. The pair became good friends and the job allowed Noke to train and fight in the US a couple of times each year.

Following Irwin's death in 2006, Noke focused on trying to crack the lucrative and high-profile UFC circuit. He moved to New Mexico permanently and a break soon followed, as a middleweight fighter on the preliminary card of Ultimate Fighter 11, the UFC's wildly popular reality television product. The show, which follows fighters trying to make it onto a UFC card, televised his debut in June 2010. He won that in a technical knockout and backed it up with two more wins before a loss through submission to American Ed Herman in November.