Actor Simon Baker rarely reads the financial pages in the newspaper, but in 2008 when the economy cratered, he started paying attention. Not only had those stories moved to the front page, the carnage was only too evident simply from walking around his own neighborhood.

 

"You could see it everywhere you went," he says over the phone, calling during a moment of downtime on his TV series "The Mentalist." "Where I live, in a nice part of Los Angeles, stores were closing down. There were so many empty shops on the little street just around the corner from me in what was a thriving area. I could see a lot more houses for lease - there are never houses for lease around here. You could see the shift across the board."

 

At the time, the arcane details of the crisis struck him as almost like a foreign language.

 

More recently, he's come to a deeper understanding of it, as one of the key players in "Margin Call," writer-director J.C. Chandor's sleek thriller set in one of those "too big to fail" investment banking firms at the dawn of the debacle. Realizing that they are teetering on the brink of disaster, a group of executives spring into action to save their Wall Street firm, regardless of the consequences for Main Street at large. In a powerhouse ensemble that includes Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, Zachary Quinto and Penn Badgley, Baker plays a decisive top lieutenant in the firm who acts without panic or pangs of conscience.

 

"My character is the guy in the black hat, the dark guy on the horizon in a lot of ways. He's the guy that's there that's just take no prisoners. He signed a deal with the devil a long time ago and has just accepted it," the 42-year-old Australian says.

 

"You can argue that he's a horrible character, but if I were someone investing money and I'm entrusting people to make decisions for me, I don't want someone emotional," he adds. "I want somebody who's totally detached from any emotion. I could justify that guy's existence. He's an animal of that world."

 

Chandor's father worked at Merrill Lynch for nearly four decades and, over the years, the filmmaker observed the changes to the way Wall Street operates. As he explained it to his cast, it was not just the invention of dubious investment products like mortgage-backed securities that helped bring about the 2008 financial meltdown but a mutation of the stock market's purpose.

 

"He has a good little rave about the fact that in America we used to make things," Baker says. "That's what the stock market was all about, it was all about keeping the money flowing, so that we could make things. And now we just juggle money backward and forward and try to make more money out of it."

 

"Margin Call" is an unusual movie in that there are no heroes, but Baker argues that there are no villains either, not even his own "black hat." If there is a villain, it is greed. In this universe, greed goes hand in hand with success, skewing priorities and heightening self-interest. Baker draws the contrast between his own life and that of someone like his "Margin Call" character.

 

"I'm an actor. I work on my TV show, that's my day job, and I do films," he says. "When I work on the TV show, there's a certain sense of responsibility that I carry. At any given time, I feel a sense of responsibility to the 150 people who work on the show and the amount of money that's invested into the show. I carry those responsibilities and that helps define who I am.

 

The "Margin Call" characters "live in a purely capitalistic world," he continues. "Their whole purpose is making money, and making money is success. It's a weird and unhealthy measure of success, I think. Success is a powerful drug. There's a sense of immortality when you're feeling successful. That's the danger of it, that you feel, 'I'm on fire, I'm a genius. Look at how much money I made last week. I can probably make more, because I think I'm onto something here.' Hubris is the rope they sort of hang themselves with."

 

After getting his start in Australia, where he won a Logie, a television award, for most popular new talent in 1993 for his role in the series "E Street," Baker came to the United States. His first role was opposite Kevin Spacey in 1997's "L.A. Confidential," an auspicious start to his U.S. career.

 

"I was a kid all wet behind the ears and he was very welcoming," Baker says. "I really cherished the experience of working with Kevin. ... I learned a lot from watching him, his approach to his work and the dedication and the risks that he would take. ... I've carried that with me a lot. I love those experiences. They just help you grow and develop, and I think that's sort of what life's about."

 

Relevance a lure

Baker works long hours on "The Mentalist," now in its fourth season, so he's choosy about what movies he'll do during his hiatus. "Margin Call's" lures included its relevance and the chance it afforded Baker to work with an exceptional group of actors.

 

"I want to work with good people who I can learn from," he says. "I've been doing this for nearly 20 years, but I've never, ever, ever looked at myself as a fully rounded actor. I always sort of saw myself as a student, and I think I probably always will. Because of that, there's always this desire to be around people who know more than me, who I think have more experience and who I look up to and who will challenge me a bit. This was the perfect situation."