Fallin on his feet

May 22 2003
By Debi Enker

Baker as Nick Fallin in The Guardian.

There was a striking symmetry when Simon Baker presented two of the big three awards on Logies night. Eleven years ago, Baker had been the recipient of the Most Popular New Talent award for his work on E Street. Now, he'd returned to the stage of Australian television's much-hyped night of nights as the golden boy made good, the star of the US drama series, The Guardian, and as a high-profile celebrity guest.

Over the last decade, Baker has carved out the kind of career that many aspiring actors dream about. He started out in soaps (E Street, Home and Away, Heartbreak High), then packed up his young family to take a chance on Tinseltown. His first role was a small but memorable one in the award-winning thriller, LA Confidential. After finding a foothold in the film industry, he also found favour with Leslie Moonves, the head of the CBS network, and was offered the lead in the Pittsburgh-based legal drama.

His perpetually troubled character, lawyer Nick Fallin, is now a familiar TV presence and the show is comfortably poised between its second and third seasons. Baker, who has also directed an episode in the second season, is even in a position to do a movie during the "hiatus". And he had a pile of scripts to choose from.

The one he's picked is a psychological thriller "about relationships and fidelity" by writer-director Alan Brown, who previously made a short film that was well-received at the Sundance Film Festival. It's not a big-budget, mainstream choice and it doesn't seem destined to become a box-office blockbuster. Which is part of the reason that Baker has chosen it.

"I read a lot of scripts during the year in the hope of being able to work on something during the hiatus, just to have something else to do creatively other than being that little prick, Nick Fallin," Baker explains with disarming candour. "I'm drawn to stuff that is not necessarily commercial. I figure I work on commercial television, I don't need to do a big cheesy, commercial movie."

Baker is clearly proud of the series in which he plays the title character, a hot-shot corporate lawyer and convicted drug offender who's ordered to serve out his sentence doing community service work in a child-advocacy office. But that doesn't mean he's not aware of the show's limitations, either for him as an actor or as a product of free-to-air network television.

"There's a certain standard that the show sets when we get it right, which is obviously not every episode," he says. "But when all the elements come together the right way, we capture something that is rare on commercial network television in America. I'm excluding shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under which screen on HBO and don't have the restrictions that a show like ours has. We have to deal with Standards and Practices, advertisers and affiliate stations. We have to adhere to a five-act structure, with commercial breaks. On HBO, they have a subscription base, they have no limits, really, as to what they can do. We have to create stand-alone shows that can be played out-of-sequence."

Created by David Hollander, The Guardian has both the top end of town and the grimy mean streets covered. Nick spends a part of his professional life in the offices of Fallin & Fallin, a powerhouse law firm he runs in partnership with his father, the venerable Burton (Dabney Coleman). There he deals with bullying CEOs and corporate takeovers. Then he grabs his expensive coat and natty briefcase and heads downtown to a desk in the less luxurious offices of Legal Services, where he battles to represent the interests of teenage incest victims, abused street kids and child prostitutes.

He's forced to straddle the two worlds and to deploy his street smarts, negotiating skills and courtroom wiles to best effect in both places. The price he pays is that, in these worlds of murky moralities, where law and justice might be very different things and where good intentions often don't result in great outcomes, there's a lot of heartache. The Guardian isn't a drama known for its sunny disposition: most of the time, life in Pittsburgh is pretty grim.

For Baker, the show might have legal backdrop, but it's really about a father and son. "The core of it is this sort-of love story between the father and the son, how they're trying to have a relationship and they can't: they just can't communicate. That's something that's not necessarily spoken about in the show, but it's the core."

Baker thought from the time that he read Hollander's pilot script that he could do something interesting with Nick Fallin. Although his experience on a failed pilot, The Last Best Place, in 1996, had soured him on the idea of working in television, things had changed. For starters, his wife, actor Rebecca Rigg, whom he'd met on the set of E Street, was expecting their third child. So Baker was thinking of a more stable working life.

He'd made nine films, as various as Most Wanted (1997), Judas Kiss (1998), Love from Ground Zero (1998), Red Planet (2000) and The Affair of the Necklace (2001), but found that "every time I'd do a film, I'd come back and have to hit the pavement again and audition for other films. I didn't get the Hugh Jackman ride, or the Heath Ledger ride: one movie and click. In America, it has so much to do with money. If you're involved in a film that makes a lot of money, suddenly you're a star. But you never know how a film's going to turn out when you're making it. You always hope for the best. People don't set out to make shitty movies. You do the best you can and you hope."

While the prospect of pavement-pounding was unappealing, Baker had also noticed that there were interesting things happening in television: he thought that some of the recent series were better written than a lot of the movies he'd seen.

He was keen to give it a try: "I thought I could do something with the role that would probably be a lot different from what a lot of other actors in America would try to do with it," he explains. What he was aiming to do was to follow in the footsteps of some of the Hollywood greats he'd admired, men such as William Holden, Gary Cooper, Steve McQueen and more recently Clint Eastwood. He wanted to create a quietly intriguing anti-hero.

"I love the way that those older guys were able to bring you into their world. You made a decision to join them on their journey. I was always a big fan of the old westerns and the films and television from the '70s: where the guy rode into town and didn't give anything away but let the audience in completely. He doesn't say a lot, he's very reactive. And then he gets his information and is very active.

"I thought I could walk a line with Nick, that I could make the character very internal, where he wasn't likeable but the audience would still root for him. There was this challenge: I thought I could play this sort of thing where you're hoping he makes the right choices and you feel for him when he makes the wrong choices."

Baker was also very clear about what he didn't want. He didn't want to play Nick Fallin large and loud: he didn't want one of those "look-at-me-ma-I'm emoting" performances that he regards disdainfully as "acting acting".

"A lot of people got into this pattern, I think, in the '80s, where good acting was acting acting: really acting out, angry, emotional. And I just felt this longing to do something that was not so external. I was sick of watching showing-off."

But if part of Baker's inspiration came from his movie idols, from actors who, he says, were masterful at conveying the impression that they'd really rather be somewhere else - and were all the more intriguing for it - he reckons that part of his inspiration also came from his cultural heritage.

"I love the stoic nature. Growing up in Australia, I saw so many of those people. You watch a football game in Australia and someone scores a try under the post and you don't see too much self-congratulatory behaviour. It's sort of, well, OK, put your head down, try not to smile.

"You're playing pool and you sink the black after sinking seven balls, and the other guy hasn't sunk a ball yet, and you put the black down with a tremendous shot, you don't go 'Yeah!' and Tom Cruise-ify it. That, to me, is interesting. I think Russell Crowe played a South Sydney footballer in Gladiator. You know that shot where he runs on to the field? He was a bloody footballer going out for the Grand Final. For me, it was fantastic. I loved to see that. It's so Australian. I mean, c'mon, high-fives and all that crap? It's not our way."

Baker, who returned to Sydney in 1999 to work on the telemovie Secret Men's Business, believes that his Australian training also contributed to his on-set attitude. "You tend to collaborate more," he observes. "It was something that I was blessed with, growing up as an actor working in Australia. We tend to discuss and share ideas. I also find that in Australia, when actors collaborate, they're not trying to do it for their own benefit, which is often a big flaw with American actors: the vanity gets in the way of what they're actually there for.

"I'm very direct at work, I'm very honest and I'm very much about increasing the quality of the product, of strengthening the story, making it more interesting. It's not ever about me. I don't need to do that on the show: I am The Guardian. I actually want other people to have more screen time so that I can have a break sometimes."

When Baker says he's "direct", he also means he has little patience for some of the hired-gun directors, "journeymen" who he thinks treat it like just another legal drama, who are oblivious to its father-son core and shoot their episodes accordingly.

"Sometimes we have directors who don't really look at the show properly. They think 'Oh, it's a legal show. This is a story about a hot-shot lawyer.' They think that's where all the drama is. But it's not necessarily about what's on the page: it's about what's going on underneath all of that."

He was giving some of the hired help such a hard time that the producers offered him an episode to direct. "I had a ball," he says, flashing a sunny smile rarely seen on The Guardian. "It was so much fun, directing is a trip. I'm going to do a couple more next season. It feels more whole than acting. I know it sounds like a cliche: an actor who wants to direct, but I always did. I've always thought more like a director and when I worked with Ang Lee (on Ride with the Devil in 1999), Ang said to me, 'You should write and direct.'

"I can't write: I don't have the patience to write. But I like to take something that I read and visualise it and then put the pieces together. I like the craft of putting the pieces together. My episode is very tightly constructed, it joins together smoothly: it's not bang, bang, bang, choppy, choppy. That was fun for me, to be in control, instead of sitting there and going, 'Oh, that's a bit of an obvious choice, isn't it?'"

Reflecting on his career, Baker is a lot more measured than his agent might be. He doesn't see an inspiring tale of a boy from Down Under making good in Hollywood. "I've never, ever looked at this like, 'I'm on a hit TV series in America: I've made it.' I've never approached it like that. For me it's always been about the personal fulfilment in what I'm doing at the time."