From:Daily Telegraph, Australia
Date:Aug 4, 2005
By Peter Mitchell

LOS ANGELES: Australian actor Simon Baker has been dubbed Hollywood's new Steve McQueen.
McQueen, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking tough guy from 1960s classics The Great Escape, Bullitt and The Magnificent Seven, had an icy, anti-hero presence audiences adored.

Two powerful Hollywood players, producer Mark Canton and director George Romero, believe the Tasmanian-born Baker, with his blond locks and penetrating blue eyes, has that same on-screen charisma.

That is why Canton and Romero cast Baker as the anti-hero, zombie killing star of their new film, Land of the Dead.

"We were looking for that Steve McQueen style anti-hero and Simon is that guy," Canton, the former chairman of Hollywood studio Columbia Tristar and responsible for bringing more than 300 of Hollywood's biggest films to the screen, said.

"He has a subtlety to the way he acts."

The line, "Girls wanted him and men wanted to be him" followed McQueen, nicknamed The King of Cool, until his death in 1980 from lung cancer.

Tell Simon Baker, 36, he has been compared to screen legend McQueen and the notoriously shy Australian brushes it aside. "That sounds like such a Mark Canton line," Baker responds. "Mark just flatters me.”

Is it true? "Well, you just do what you can, right? If you put labels on yourself, then you are shooting yourself in the foot aren't you?

"If you accept labels being put on you then you might as well be holding the gun as well.

"I'm just going to shrug it off. Laugh it off."

When Canton, Land of the Dead's producer, and Romero, the director, sat down to discuss who would be their star, both came up with Baker's name.

Canton produced Baker's 2000 sci-fi film Red Planet and Romero, who lives in Pittsburgh, was aware of the Australian actor through Baker's TV drama series The Guardian, set in the US steel city.

"I organised a meeting with Simon and just thought he was terrific," Romero said.

"We sat down for an afternoon, chatted, talked about the script and he had a clear idea what he wanted to do with the character."

Land of the Dead is 65-year-old Romero's return to the zombie genre. His 1968 breakthrough zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, has become one of the most celebrated horror films in Hollywood movie history.

Land of the Dead, the fourth and possibly the final chapter in Romero's series, was shot in Toronto at night over two months in the middle of Canada's bitter winter.

The film is set in Pittsburgh, a city that has been transformed into a wasteland overrun by zombies.

Humans are forced to live in a heavily fortified compound with large walls protecting them from millions of brain eating zombies.

Baker's character, Riley, is head of a hardened group of mercenaries paid to run missions through the zombie infested wasteland to pick up food and other supplies.

"Simon worked almost every night," Romero said.

"If he had been unco-operative we just would not have got the film done, but he was fantastic."