1 hour ago
1
In Scarpetta, Simon Baker spends most of his time disappearing from view. His character in the crime drama, FBI agent Benton Wesley, slides out of rooms, eats his breakfast alone in a corner, and disappears into the pantry.
“He’s a quiet character,” agrees Baker, who is in Sydney ahead of the show’s release. “And what happens with him dramatically, and the tension in that character, is within him. It’s not necessarily rambunctious or verbose, he’s not an obvious, loud presence in a room. There’s a lot of big characters in this show that are willingly expressing their thoughts and ideas constantly, whereas he has this very measured restraint. And I was interested in what’s going on with him the whole time.
Those “big characters” are chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, played by Nicole Kidman, who is also Benton’s wife; Kay’s sister Dorothy Farinelli, played by Jamie Lee Curtis; and Dorothy’s husband, and Scarpetta’s workmate, Pete Marino, played by Bobby Cannavale. All three yell and stomp, and push each other around, whereas Benton stands off to the side.
It’s a role that particularly suits Baker, who also speaks quietly and scrunches his nose to keep his heavy-framed glasses from slipping down. Ever since he left the bright lights of US network TV, where he led two high-profile, long-running dramas, The Mentalist and The Guardian, Baker has been finding roles that put him to the side. Not dramatically – he’s delivered some of his strongest work in Netflix’s Boy Swallows Universe, Amazon Prime Video’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and Del Kathryn Barton’s film Blaze – but as a solid support, where he is not the focus.
It is something that has come with age. Now that he is 56 – and I do wonder how to put this delicately – is there a freedom that comes with no longer being in his “pretty-boy” era?
“I’m not offended,” he says, laughing. “You’re not blind. Yeah, there’s a freedom, for sure. Earlier in my career, there was a lot more energy thrust into trying to build and develop a career. There’s a lot of ambition and spirit around, fighting to get yourself into a position.
“It’s really nice now to be able to sit back a bit and decide which things that I want to work on, and what characters. All of those jobs that you mentioned, the focus of the story doesn’t sit primarily on my shoulders, which is liberating as well, because you get to play, you get to dance, I feel like I can take a few more risks, which is nice.”
Despite having known each other for decades – and having even lived with Kidman and her former husband Tom Cruise in Los Angeles – this is only the second time Baker and Kidman have worked together on screen, after the Apple TV miniseries Roar.
Does knowing someone so intimately make it easier or harder when it comes to working with them?
“I think any kind of awkwardness around friendship, that sort of stuff, is quickly brushed aside,” he says. “I mean that’s the great thing about working. I’ve worked with a lot of inexperienced actors, and I quite enjoy that process, and the innocence and the naivety and the willingness. But also working with very experienced campaigners, it’s great to just get in there and work. There isn’t any kind of navel-gazing, we’re just going get into the work and throw it into the pot and see what we can make.”
Is it a bit weird kissing Kidman, though? Surely, it’s a bit like kissing your sister? “I don’t kiss and tell,” he smiles.
Scarpetta, which is adapted from Patricia Cornwell’s best-selling series, is split across two timelines: the 1990s, where a young Kay (played by Rosy McEwen) and a young Benton (Hunter Parrish), are at the beginning of their careers, and the present-day, where an old case has come back to haunt Scarpetta. Benton, a serial killer profiler with the FBI, is also working on the case.
For both Baker and Kidman, having a younger version of themselves played a different actor meant matching part of their performance to that actor. It’s a tricky double-act, one made all the harder by the fact Parrish was only cast as the young Benton late in the piece.
“I don’t know that we necessarily look that similar, but there’s an energy that he’s able to capture which is similar to the energy that I’m doing,” says Baker. “And we both play into that space. He was one of the last younger versions cast. So leading into shooting the show, we were only a couple of days away from shooting, and I was calling [showrunner] Liz [Sarnoff] every day saying, ‘Listen, who’s going to play young Benton? Because there’s a lot of character choices that aren’t necessarily defined on the page that I’m going to make decisions about. And I think it’s only fair that I talk to whoever plays younger Benton so that we can actually collaborate.’
“So he came in really late, and we sat down, and I’d already been working with the dialect coach and playing around with that and making decisions of how I wanted to play the character. I ran that by him, and he was great. He gave me the latitude to use a lot of the choices that I wanted to make. And I think he’s done a really good job with it.”
It’s not the first time Baker will have been confronted with, let’s say, a younger version of himself this year. When the highly anticipated film The Devil Wears Prada 2 comes out in May, Baker’s slimy journalist Christian is nowhere to be seen, having been kicked to the curb by Andrea (Anne Hathaway) in the first film.
Where does he think Christian is now? “He might have got a little embroiled in the #MeToo movement,” Baker decides. “He might have copped a bit there. I’m not really sure. He could be a hedge-fund guy or a start-up guy, going into finance. A real estate agent.”
Now, another Australian – Colin From Accounts’ Patrick Brammall – has been installed in the sequel as Andrea’s love interest.
“Dumped!” That’s very kind of you,” he says, laughing. “The Devil Wears Prada was a very loved and successful film, and it helped launch a lot of people’s careers. And it’s really good that other people get those opportunities. I mean, that film did great things for me, and I think it’s really good that other people get to have the opportunity of being part of that.”
Scarpetta streams on Amazon Prime Video from March 11.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday
