Extract from Premium Hollywood report on TCA Press Tour - July 2008

 

Simon Baker admitted that he got particular enjoyment out of playing the flashback scenes to his character’s early days. "That was a lot of fun,” he said, "because you’re playing an actor and you get to actually comment on the shallowness of acting. You’re commenting on yourself, so it’s sort of self-deprecating in a sense. I love that the character is a fraud and is aware of his fraudulent nature.”

 

Baker did not, however, have an opportunity to do much research on playing a TV psychic, given the speed at which things happened with his casting and the pilot’s subsequent filming. "I was flown in from Australia, met with Bruno (Heller, producer) the day I arrived,” said Baker, "and a day and a half later, we were shooting, basically. So Bruno said, ‘Have a look at a few different people on YouTube,’ and I had a look at stuff. Next thing, I had my whole family around me, we’re all going, ‘Oh, my God, how did he do that? How did he do that?’ And then on YouTube, there’s also people posting other clips where they debunk, explaining how these tricks are working through NLP, neurolinguistic programming.It’s just tip-of-the-surface of the knowledge that these people have, so I didn’t ask anything.

 

We had a consultant from the Magic Castle, who was more of a sleight-of-hand guy, but he had a few different hypnotizing tricks and stuff like that. And Bruno furnished me with a bunch of literature, holiday reading. It’s very heady stuff. What these guys get into and the skills that they have and then the capacity to remember things and move forward is…it’s too much for me. I’m pretending totally 100 percent to be a mentalist.”