2005 (March) Herald Sun interview - Interviews 1992-2007 - File Catalog

Baker leaves the family enclave and we move to another table to chat. After negotiating the encyclopedia-length menu, he winces. "It's such a great spot, but they just don't get breakfasts
over here," he laments, as super-sized plates of eggs, bacon and potatoes are delivered to tables all around us. "They're just screaming for a decent restaurant in this area, but there aren't
any," he says, as we mutually engage in the coffee dance that all Aussies based in the US recognise. We both order double espresso with a side of milk (the only way to get a half decent cup of coffee). Our milk is delivered in a huge mug and, as we try and get a dash into our coffees, we end up spilling it all over the table like a couple of babies, laughing at the silliness of it all.

Amid the cluster of noisy Sunday morning families that fill the restaurant, Baker fits right in. With his loose-fitting comfy clothes, tousled sandy hair and unshaven face, he's certainly handsome ' but in a more rugged way than the smoothed-out look that lighting and film cameras give him. At age 35, he's growing into his face, with those lines that (annoyingly, on a man) make him look
even sexier. And there's that wonderful smile, which he flashes at me at regular intervals.

Like some of the emotionally distant characters he portrays, I expect to find Baker somewhat aloof, but to my surprise, he's quite the opposite. He displays a complete lack of ego and is, at times, quite confessional in his responses. "I read interviews that I've done and I sound like such a dickhead," he laughs. "At first it really didn't seem like such a big decision," he says of his move to the US in 1995. After a stint in the soapie E Street (for which he won a Best New Talent Logie in 1992), Baker was up for a new challenge. He already had two good mates who'd made the move; Nicole Kidman (who went to school with Rebecca and is Harry's godmother) and Naomi Watts (who served as Rigg's bridesmaid at the pair's wedding).

"It was a very different time back then. These days, an Australian actor can do one Australian film, and come over here and get work. Back then it didn't really matter what you had done back home, you had to come over here and start from scratch," he says. "Now they're always looking at Aussie stuff, like we've been discovered as some freaky genetic talent pool."

Doing the hard yards meant six long years of endless auditions, some good work (such as a pivotal role in LA Confidential, all the while waiting for that big break. But did he ever feel discouraged? "No, it was invigorating," he protests. "Instead of reading one decent script every three months and everyone fighting to get in first, I'd be going to three auditions a day."

Rigg, who's also an actor (she appeared in E Street and the movies Fatty Finn and Spotswood), was hunting for work, too, when they first arrived (in fact, she was probably better known in Australia than Baker when they relocated), but she now prefers to stay at home with the kids. She has, however, recently appeared in Ellie Parker, a film with pal Naomi Watts, which made its debut at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in January. "Her agent calls her every now and then and she says, 'I really don't know why you're bothering , I'm not that interested,"' says Baker.

And while Kidman and Watts are close friends, Baker says he doesn't really socialise with the LA Aussie contingent. "I think people sometimes think that Hollywood is like a suburb where we all hang out together," he says. "I'm not the sort of person who'll call someone just for a chat. There's only this many people [he holds his hand up with fingers extended] that I would call in the world for a chat. People think I'm a pariah because I'm hopeless at returning e-mails," he admits. "But I cannot see someone for six years and just pick up where we left off."

Still, a decade in LA has happened more by accident than by design for the Bakers. "We stayed for a year and then it just came to a point where it was going to be harder to pack up and go back to Australia. It would be more unsettling, as well as going back to an industry that has less and less opportunities," he says.

These days, even visits home are not that frequent. "We don't get back [to Australia] as much as we would like. We don't have a house there any more and, with three kids to organise, it makes it quite a production to travel."

So does LA now feel more like home? "That's a difficult question," he says, as he toys with his eggs. 'I suppose the kids feel like it's home, because the boys have been here all their life and Stella [Baker's oldest daughter] has been here for most of her life. But I still find myself punctuating conversations with, 'If we're still here then.' I don't know... I guess at some point you have to submit and say yes. Otherwise it feels like you've spent 10 years in no man's land. I guess you could say we're reasonably settled."

I wonder if he feels as though LA is a good place to raise his kids. "I think that's all relative to what relationship you have with your kids and how they feel about themselves," he says. "I
think we feel we have a responsibility to give them a world view, which is something that is lacking in this country"

It was mainly for his family's security that Baker took the job as Nick Fallin in The Guardian, a role he was initially reluctant to accept, mainly due to the relentless grind of filming a TV series.

"To be honest," he says, as he wrestles with a bottle of tomato sauce, "a lot of choices and decisions I had to make were influenced by having a family to support. The decision to do the show was made after constantly being at the end of a shoestring and not knowing where I was headed. That's exciting when you're young, but when your kids are starting to get to school age, I felt a sense of responsibility. I did the TV show to have something solid."

Baker says the show did provide him with a much-needed confidence boost. He'd never formally trained as an actor and early work in Australia like appearing in Drumsticks ice-cream commercials and dancing in Mehssa Tkautz's 'Read My Lips' music video probably don't count. "Doing the series was a way of overcoming my inferiority complex of not going to drama school. I could make a shitload of money and get on-the job training. I ended up doing 70 hours of television over three years. It's hard to beat that kind of experience."

Baker soon became hooked on the security of the work and, now that it's all over (The Guardian was cancelled last year), he again faces the challenges of the unknown. "The problem is, you get used to earning good money and having regular employment - it's ridiculous how hard that habit is to break. And when you're thrust out there again, and you have five mouths to feed and your family has grown accustomed to a certain standard of living, then you really can feel
like shit."

Not that he has to worry; he already has three back-to-back films, including the highly anticipated sequel to the mega successful and wonderfully creepy thriller, The Ring. The Ring 2 has Naomi Watts reprising her role as the terrorised newspaper journalist and young mother. This time around she has relocated with her son to a sleepy Oregon town and is working on the local paper, while Baker plays a fellow reporter drawn into the horror.

"I get very defensive about the film because people assume that because Naomi is a close personal mate, that's how I got the job. I had to jump through hoops to get the part, just like any other actor in this town," he says. "Naomi assures me she had nothing to do with it and I believe her, because I had to go through so many readings and auditions. I think I spent more time
auditioning than I did shooting the film."

After The Ring 2 Baker shot a zombie movie in Canada called Land of the Dead for famed horror film director George Romero and he's just about to start shooting an inter-racial romance called 42.4 Percent. "When I go home today I have to rehearse with my co-star," he says, jokingly. (Baker's meeting his on-screen canine companion.) "My character has a pivotal relationship with his dog, so they're bringing him over to bond with me." (The Bakers recently got their own dog, an eight-month-old cocker spaniel, whom he says the kids adore.)

But even with all this work, the actor admits he's still insecure about the future. "Well, it's not really a permanent job, is it?" he says. "I don't really have that galvanised self-confidence to be
an actor."

The very down-to-earth Baker is unlikely to be found power-lunching in Beverly Hills - it's not his scene. "I love acting, but the politics and the business of it I'm not good at. I've always been
someone who likes to sit on the sidelines. I never feel like going head-long into it, which probably reflects in my career," he says. "It's my nature. I keep things at an arm's length all the time."

"I'm really crap at selling myself," he continues. "I don't play that whole game - I don't have the DNA to really sell myself or hype myself and when I do I make such an arse of myself then I'm full of self-loathing. I start to think, 'What am I doing?' I feel like some cheap hooker.'

It seems strange for a highly successful actor to have an outlook that seems so negative. "Yeah, I often think that myself," he admits. "I always have this feeling that the river is going to run dry sooner or later and everyone is going to realise that I'm really not that good, and I'm always thinking what else I could do instead."

Has he thought about an alternate career? He considers himself quite the handyman around the house, but his wife brings him straight back to earth. "She points out that I'm such an actor
that suddenly I'm playing Simon the yard worker. When she said that, it kind of shattered me, but I guess it's kind of true; role-playing is so inherent in me."

But one role that does come naturally is husband and dad. He met Rigg when he was just 22 and their daughter Stella, now 11, was born, as Baker likes to point out, "when I was eight days
into being 24'. He was a young dad. "I guess it sounds young these days," he dismisses. "But it did hurtle me down the track a little quickly, and got me out of my self-indulgent 20s pretty fast.'

Grounding himself in family so young is not surprising considering his childhood was so erratic. Born in Tasmania, his mother was a teacher and his father a caretaker. But they split when he was two and his mother married a butcher named Tom Denny (hence Baker's first acting moniker as Simon Baker-Denny). The family then moved to Lennox Head, near Byron Bay, but that marriage ended as well (Baker has an older sister and three young half-siblings). While he's reluctant to discuss his early life, he admits softly that his kids at least have something "a lot better than what I had when I was growing up".