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File Catalog |
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2009 (March) Emmy Mag article/interview
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| 17-Nov-10, 2:30 PM |
Source : Emmy Magazine Date: Issue 03-09
On his third CBS series, the unassuming Simon Baker suddenly found himself the star of the season’s breakout hit. Now, as The Mentalist approaches season two, this sunny Australian — at home on both sides of the Pacific — has hit his stride as a savvy sleuth with a dark past. But plenty of bright days likely lie ahead for this procedural that’s not wedded to procedure.
Is it even possible to consider the success of the CBS hit The Mentalist without taking into account the abundant appeal of its star, Simon Baker? Focus, for example, on his looks, which an entire crew is doing on a morning in Malibu, where he’s being photographed for this magazine.
He’d rather you didn’t – focus on the looks, that is –but when you’re a charming Australian with a merry, dimpled smile, tousled gold curls and pale green eyes, attention will be paid, like it or not.
Just now he’s on the deck of a beach house, stretched out in a cushioned alcove in a crisp blue-and-white striped shirt, the tail hanging out over soft blue lounge pants. Behind him are bright white walls and a square of the dazzling Pacific. He turns on a cool, steady gaze.
"Give me a smirk,” cajoles photographer Jack Guy, and eleven people watch him oblige. An assistant offers a mimosa, but he demurs: "That’d be the end of me, mate.”
Now he’s out on the beach, in white pants rolled up to the knees and a snug blue polo shirt. The crew has decamped to a castaway-style set with a thatched pagoda.
"This is like Gilligan’s Island,” Baker cracks as he takes his place, barefoot, in front of the lights and lenses. He sits arms wrapped around his knees. The shutter clicks away and he turns this way and that. "Somebody talk,” he prods hopefully, unnerved by the silent spotlight. "I’m going batty.”
Guy braces himself on a long piece of driftwood that arches across the sand. "Watch it – that’s gonna go.” Baker observes, but he’s drowned out by a swarm of Harleys roaring by on Pacific Coast Highway.
As if on cue, the driftwood topples, sending the photographer staggering and his assistant crashing to the sand. A smile lights up Baker’s face, and he stands, delighted to have the focus temporarily off him, the spell broken and the ground once again beneath his feet—or the camera assistant’s bum, as the case may be.
It’s been more than thirteen years since Baker and his young family first landed in Los Angeles, and as of late the photo shoots have been much more frequent. From Malibu, he went straight to a session with photographer Brigitte Lacombe, for an Instyle feature dubbed The Sexy Portfolio. Weeks later his image, captured by Cliff Watts, appeared on the cover of TV Guide, which anointed him "the sexiest male television star.”
When The Mentalist debuted last fall, it certainly wasn’t Baker’s first series. He’d starred for three years in The Guardian, and more recently, with Ray Liotta in the short-lived Smith (both were on CBS), and he’d had a long string of movie roles, many forgettable.
But something was different with this drama, about a former TV psychic, Patrick Jane, who seeks redemption for a personal tragedy by working as a police consultant. Ratings started strong—the show averaged 15.4 million viewers in its first two Tuesdays at 9 – and improved notably from there, even against the Fox juggernaut, American Idol. Reviews, despite scepticism over yet another charismatic crimefighter, revealed a consistent level of enjoyment.
Within weeks of the premiere, the network ordered six more episodes; then came a full season order, then a renewal. By late fall, The Mentalist was declared the only bona fide hit among all of the season’s new scripted shows. Baker, it seemed, had finally arrived.
Speaking in a trailer on location behind Union Station, L.A.’s historic train depot, he credits some of his good fortune to having found a show creator Bruno Heller, whose sensibility meshes with his own.
"When I read the pilot, I thought it was very well written, and also, it was a procedural show on CBS, the network that knows how to do procedural shows best, "he relates. "But I noticed that it was having a bit of a wink at itself. It seemed to be slightly sending up procedurals. I wasn’t sure if this was just my interpretation, but when I spoke to Bruno, he got it. He’s got a very wry, clever, subversive sense of humour. But he’s restrained with it, which I like. He didn’t want go on and on about it. But I could see that he knew what I was talking about, and we clicked with that.
On top of the sly tone, he notes, the show—which is based on the Warner Bros Lot in Burbank—bucks the trend toward gruesome, grisly and scientific that has defined the cutting edge these past few years in shows like CSI and its spinoffs and copycats.
"We’re not slaves to procedure the way many shows are,” Baker observes. "We don’t use DNA, we don’t use microscopes—I don’t even carry a gun. It’s very old-fashioned show in that the truth is found in human nature. The idea is that an everyday man or woman could solve these crimes. It’s all about cunning. That excited me when I first read the script. "
The secret formula, if there is one, can’t be attributed to a remarkably new format. Seven of the past season’s fifteen top-rated shows were crime dramas, and CBS, as many have noted, presents more procedurals than any competitor. To be sure, The Mentalist has a refreshingly light touch, but its lead-in, NCIS, has been polishing a similar angle for years. And the ESP thing? NBC’s Medium and USA’s Psych got there first.
"It’s a case of an actor finding the right role,” says Heller, also the show’s executive producer. "Simon is a star in that when people see him doing something they like, they want to see more of that. And people haven’t been able to see him before doing this kind of consistently funny, charming role.”
Charm and an easy friendliness come naturally to Baker. He’s the kind of Aussie you can imagine bending an elbow with at the corner pub. He enjoys a good chat, and his merry smile is frequent. But he’s also more thoughtful than you might expect.
"Simon is a very serious actor – he really is,” says TV veteran Martha Mitchell, who’s directed him both in The Guardian and The Mentalist. " He’s a consummate pro. He takes this approach of, ‘Let’s just keep making it better.”
"Compared to The Guardian,” she adds, "the tone of this show is so much lighter, and I think he’s having more fun as Patrick Jane. But he also seems to know how to negotiate the territory of this character: when to use his powers of observation, when to use his charm, when to use his pain.”
As Jane, Baker plays his antics against the scepticism of his sometimes aggravated, sometimes admiring superior, Teresa Lisbon(Robin Tunney), a senior agent in the fictional California Bureau of Investigations. As a consultant, he’s got a longer leash than the other members of the team, which includes able cops Kimball Cho(Tim Kang) and Wayne Rigsby (Owain Yeoman) and rookie investigator Grace Van Pelt (Amanda Righetti).
His traumatic backstory, laid out in the pilot, involved his attempt, as a bogus television psychic, to profile a serial killer on the air. But the enraged psychopath reached Jane’s home before he did and left his wife and child dead, along with a taunting smiley-face signature. Jane now tries to redeem himself by working for the public good, while also seizing any chance to pick up the killer’s trail.
His approach to the character, he says, is based on years of observation.
"I’ve developed an approach that I’ve learned from working with good actors. Whenever I’m working with someone very good, I really study and watch them. And I’ve learned that the best actors always bring it themselves. They bring a lot to the role. They don’t rely on the director to encourage or flesh it out for them. They don’t ignore what’s on the page, obviously, but they don’t rely on it.
"Bruno,” he says of Heller, "was incredibly receptive to my take on the character and my ideas from the first moment we sat down to talk about it.”
"To a large degree, the character is Simon’s invention,” declares Heller, a British-born writer with a Clive Owen-like accent who was also creator—executive producer of the HBO series Rome. "There was a backstory and a framework before he came on, but as soon as an actor takes a role and runs with it, it becomes 90 percent him.
"Simon brings a sense of joy,” he continues, "and humour and a lightness and grace. It’s lightness in both senses of the word – illumination and also, he does a lot of little things that elevate the material. He carries Jane as if he’s floating a couple of inches off the ground, which is very hard to do. You can’t see him doing it, but you can feel it.”
Indeed, Jane does seem to glide around a crime scene, always skirting the others and quietly poking into places no one else bothers to look.
"He doesn’t have psychic powers – he has skills and techniques,” Baker points out. "Probably the most identifiable one is adaptability. He makes himself fit into the situation, the moment, the energy of the person he’s with.
"It’s the obvious thing to say that drama is conflict, but I like to approach it another way. When an actor comes in and wants conflict, I don’t give them conflict. Then you start to see stuff that’s a little more interesting. You see someone wanting conflict and not getting it. I don’t like to hang an actor out to dry, but that’s just part of an outside-the-box approach to the character.
"That’s why I’m often with a cop in a scene. It’s a reference point. We know how a cop stands, what a cop thinks. But I’m not a cop, so there has to be that contrast.
"The thing is, you have to get the signature character beats right in the pilot. You have to take a few risks and reach for them. Because that becomes the outlook and the attitude of the character.”
"It’s a bit heady,” he concludes with a grin, "but that’s how I approach it.”
Whatever it is, it’s a long way from Tasmania, the Australian island-state just southeast of the continent, where some 70,000 convicts were shipped from British prisons in the early nineteenth century. Baker was born there in 1969 to a working-class family, including his mother, Elizabeth, who became a high school English teacher, his father, Barry, a groundskeeper and mechanic, and older sister Terry.
When Baker was still a toddler, the family moved to New Guinea, the island nation north of Australia. His parents soon divorced, and his mother remarried, to a butcher named Tom Denny, with whom she would have three more children. The family moved south, to Sydney, then to a small town on the north coast of New south Wales, Lennox Head.
"It was the kind of family where the paychecks didn’t last through the week, and we were scratching to make ends meet,” Baker says. "But then, that’s the majority of people, isn’t it? Television was a form of escapism for us.”
After school, he remembers there were rerun American sitcoms like Happy Days and Get Smart and I Dream of Jeannie; at night, after the dishes and the homework were done, there was Columbo, The Rockford Files, Kojak and The Streets of San Francisco.
"I always found them entertaining,” he says, "and that’s always been in my head when I make a show. I didn’t set out to blow people’s minds with some sort of new approach to television. I just want people to go, "Oh, cool, Mentalist tonight!”
A surfer from age eight, Simon was identified as "the sociable one, a natural entertainer” by sister Terry, now a doctor, but he found his environment oppressive. "There was a mindset that I wanted to rebel against. I’m incredibly proud of being a working-class Australian, but I always had big dreams and big ideas and I was never really encouraged.
He distinguished himself in surfing and water polo, competing at the state level. After high school, he moved to Sydney and studied nursing for a time while working in a pub by night and also as a pizza maker and a bricklayer.
One day he accompanied a friend to an audition and was encouraged by the casting director to try out. He got the part -- in an ice cream commercial – and began to switch tracks. He appeared in music videos and then in Australian soap operas, including Home and Away, in which Heath Ledger, Naomi Watts and Guy Pearce have also done turns. Before that, he appeared in E Street; a popular soap about inner-city life, with actress Rebecca Rigg, whom he’d recently begun dating. He played a cop; she played the nurse he was having a romance with.
Off-screen, the romance was the real thing. The two had a baby, Stella Breeze, and decided to try their luck in L.A. They arrived on Christmas Eve 1995, with their daughter and $3,500. Baker got his first Stateside break in a CBS pilot, The Last Best Place, which aired in 1996 and quickly disappeared. But he also met Leslie Moonves, then president of CBS Entertainment, who remembers the network proposal.
"We offered him a contract when he first got here,” recalls Moonves, now president and CEO of CBS Corporation. "We still laugh about it. It was a holding deal, and he turned it down, even though he had a wife and a child and about $200. But we could see that he really had it, and that’s why we’ve continued to go back and offer him things. We knew that eventually we’d find the right vehicle.”
Baker soon got what looked like another significant break – a small but affecting role in the neo-noir thriller L.A. Confidential, as a dream-looking, naïve gay actor who winds up dead at the hands of a corrupt cop. But his screen time amounted to about three minutes. Fellow Aussies Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe, in the meatier roles, stole the show, and their careers took off as the movie went on to earn an Oscar nomination as best picture.
Many roles followed in not-so-memorable movies, such as Judas Kiss, Ride with the Devil, Sunset Strip and Red Planet. But Baker points out proudly that he has never stopped working.
"There’s so much envy in this town, so much psychic energy that goes into, ‘Look what this guy or that guy did.’ But I grew up in a family that couldn’t pay the mortgage, and I pay my mortgage. I’m a provider. I’m a father and a husband, first and foremost,” says the actor, who married Rigg in 1998; the couple has since had two sons, Claude Blue and Harry Friday. "I have to find my success in that.”
His next series, The Guardian, was a high point. It brought Baker a Golden Globe nomination in 2002, and when it ended after three years, the family decamped for Sydney. "We never meant to stay in America forever,” he says. "And we wanted the kids to see something of where we’d come from.”
It was daughter Stella, now fifteen, who picked up the script for The Devil Wears Prada and encouraged him to take the role of Anne Hathaway’s suave journalist suitor, Christian. "It’ll be something my friends and I can see you in,” he remembers her saying. The movie became a sleeper hit.
When Moonves saw Prada, something clicked – this was the kind of role he’d been wanting to see Baker in. "He played this roguish, handsome guy with a little bit of a ne’er-do-well quality,” he notes. "We’d had him in The Guardian, which was a modest success, but throughout that series we kept saying, ‘We have this guy with great charm, a great sense of humour, and we’re not letting him smile. We’re only showing his serious side.
"So when The Mentalist came up, we said, ‘This is the perfect vehicle.’ And that’s what happened. We finally matched the right actor with the right material.”
Baker and his family moved back to California – to Malibu – where he can indulge his love for surfing. "Sydney was fantastic, but we missed a lot of our friends here incredibly, so we came back again,” he says simply. And with The Mentalist doing as well as it is, it looks like they’ll be here for some time.
"I guess I’m bicoastal across the Pacific,” he allows. "I’m totally 100 percent Australian, but I understand America and I identify with it. My children go to school here, and as a green card holder, I pay a higher tax rate than most Americans. I’m thinking about becoming a dual citizen, because I’d like to have a say – I’d like to vote. And you don’t have to give up being a citizen of Australia, because I couldn’t do that. That’d be like taking out one of my organs while I’m still alive.”
And if being the star of television’s number one-rated new show goes to his head, he can count on his family to help him keep it in perspective. "My wife’s worked very well as a grounding mechanism in my life,” Baker says, laughing. "She could probably have a career as a grounder. Thats the thing about Australians: we’re very grounded people. Taking the piss out of you – that’s our national pastime.”
The cast and crew of The Mentalist he notes, is a family as well, one for which he feels a similar allegiance. "When you work the hours that we work, we are a family of sorts. We have to operate well together and understand each other.”
Baker also feels a responsibility to set a high bar and a positive tone on the set. "Certainly the attitude you display, as the main character on the show, is picked up by those around you. Somebody in my position, I think that’s quite a responsibility, and I don’t shy away from it. I embrace it.”
And at that, there’s a banging on the trailer door – the signal to return to work – and with a "Cheers!” and a warm handshake, Baker returns to the set to finish episode twenty-one out of twenty-two, heading for the light at the end of the tunnel of a remarkable first season.
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| Category: Interviews 2008-2011 | Added by: Fran
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