Poster boy Baker uses his loaf By Rebecca Barry Saturday Jan 2, 2010

 

Everyone wants Simon Baker. The Mentalist director wants him to reshoot a scene in which he has no lines but must walk into the office and look down at just the right angle. The makeup team wants Baker for touch-ups. The publicist wants to steal him away for a gaggle of waiting journalists. Finally, the Australian actor has a window. He looks relieved to sit down, and immediately takes a crack at the TVNZ rep for "passing up on Flight of the Conchords". Then he's pulled back on set again, shrugging off the almost-interview with a smile.

 

"It's hard. Sometimes you just want to tell people to f*** off," says the exhausted-looking star as we take a seat in an abandoned room an hour later. "The good thing about how hard you work is you don't really get a chance to think too much about external things.

 

"All I know is that when I get to the end of the week I'm exhausted. I try not to make any plans, and just chill."

 

The pressure of carrying a show is not new to Baker, who played the leading man on both The Guardian and the short-lived Smith. But The Mentalist, for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award last year and is now up for Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards, is the role of his career. What originally seemed an unlikely hit, on paper looking like a mix of CSI and House, has rated consistently well in its primetime slot and relaunched Baker as the hottest TV star of 2009.

The psych-based detective work of his character, Patrick Jane, a former stage "psychic" who uses his powers of manipulation and behavioural insight to spot liars, unnerve criminals and ultimately solve murders, could easily have turned hammy in the wrong hands.

But since its debut last year, Baker has revelled in Jane's complexities and eccentricities, demystifying the "magic" of the psychic world.

He gives Jane several contradictory traits: warmth, cockiness and vulnerability, bringing life to the otherwise implausible back story of a wife and child murdered by a serial killer. Perhaps that's why so many women have warmed to the show.

Out of character, Baker exhibits just as much intensity, minus Jane's smugness. He listens with his whole body, leaning inwards as though absorbing a secret, and speaks quietly, calmly, enticing his listener to do the same.

Cute smile or not, he has a reputation for being a bit prickly in interviews, although he has said that was because the hostility of his old character on The Guardian, callous lawyer Nick Fallin, had rubbed off on him. He starred in that show from 2001-04, during which time he had romantic notions about his craft. "I wanted to move the world with my acting," he has said.

Now, he's more interested in getting things done, and getting them done well. And Jane is a playful character so he doesn't weigh as heavily. "I'm very fortunate because two of the executive producers on The Mentalist are English," he says, flashing that famous rakish grin, "so we have a shorthand straight away. We have a sense of irony which is nice so we can have a go at each other and not get offended.

"The way I approach work here - in my Australian-ness - is that I'm very direct. If I disagree with something I'll say something about it. I don't take things personally. I don't think anyone here takes anything I say personally. Just be honest with me."

The former bricklayer left Australia in his early 20s with his actress wife, Rebecca Rigg (whom he met on the set of E Street). Since moving to Los Angeles the couple have had three children, Stella, 15, Claude, 9 and Harry, 7, who have glam godmothers in Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts.

Yet his ambitions were humble to begin with. Hollywood was less a calling than a shot at a regular income. "I was working in Australia and not working in Australia. As it is, there's not a lot going on there. So making a regular income as an actor in Australia is a very privileged position.
"I just thought if someone will hire me I'll be fine, as long as I can keep working. You're always going to be optimistic but you never consider that you're going to be in a position like this," he says, of his success since.

In 1997 he landed his first major part, as a would-be actor in LA Confidential. He followed it up with a string of middling film roles, his favourite a gigolo opposite Hilary Swank in the period drama, The Affair of the Necklace. When that flopped and Rebecca fell pregnant with their third child, he reluctantly suggested to his agent to look at TV options.

It paid off when Baker scored the lead in The Guardian, the meaty role of a hotshot, ex-drug-using attorney. But he couldn't shake the "hot guy" status entirely, with TV ads for The Guardian selling him as a piece of eye candy.

On the big screen, too, it was Baker, with his golden locks and twinkly eyes, who seduced Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada. "The dreamy guy roles? I hated that period," he says in his hybrid Aussie-American accent. "Because it's so finite, you know what I mean? I've got to grow up at some point. You had a good-looking guy who turns out to be a prick, that's shallow and one-dimensional. It's hard to have any sort of longevity of a career out of it. "I was always sort of insulted. The more interesting, quirkier actors got those roles I wanted."

The Mentalist answered his prayers, giving Baker a platform to showcase his charm and intellect - even if the workload has been tough. "The challenge is what's exciting about it. After one year, yeah, the show is really successful over here and a few other places but the thing that keeps driving you along is the challenge.

 

Can the second year be successful as well? "Historically, [what happens in] the second year of a lot of shows is that they dip down and they sort of fumble around and try to find why the show is successful. I'm sure we'll do a little bit of that, but I'm just getting on with it, enjoying playing the character and keeping my attitude right. "Being constantly on and mental fatigue and all of those things factor into it so the key to getting over most of those things is having my attitude adjusted in the right way so that negative things just sort of run off me."

It helps that Baker has cast-mates of similar temperament. "It gets a bit brutal - the banter, back and forth," says friend Tim Kang, who plays agent Kimball Cho.

But the most grounding force is Baker's home life. "We go back to Australia a lot," says Baker. "It's incredibly important. And I think we've done it quite successfully. My kids love Australia and understand the culture, enough to be able to slip back and forwards without a problem. Obviously the sense of humour in my household, the way we approach things is like a little slice of Australia. We approach things in a very straightforward way."