The Fabulous Baker Boy

From:Herald Sun Melbourne
Date:March 20th 2005
by Katherine Tulich

Nine am on a Sunday morning is not the customary time you'd be
expecting any showbiz types to schedule an interview. "Oh, Simon
doesn't mind, he's up early with his kids," the chirpy publicist
informs me when I'm told of my scheduled meeting with Aussie actor
Simon Baker. (Silly of me to think that maybe they'd consider the
journalist would rather be sleeping at that hour.) Not only that,
but Baker wants to meet at the very north end of Malibu (which
stretches 4Okm) at a place called Paradise Cove (the setting for
such famous 1960s California surfing movies such as Beach Blanket
Bingo and Gidget), a lengthy hour-plus drive up the coast.

Feeling like I've driven halfway to San Francisco by the time I
reach the designated meeting spot, I find the Baker clan, which
today comprises wife Rebecca Rigg and their two youngest children,
Claude, five, and Harry, three, happily nestled in a wooden booth
facing oceanside at the Paradise Cove Beach Cafe, a quaint but
anachronistic beach shack that looks as if it's way beyond its
halcyon days.

Baker seems familiar with the travel-weary face of a visitor to this
area. "I always schedule meetings up here," he tells me with a hint
of glee. "It gets people away from that whole LA thing and once you
get here you can really chill out."
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 can not 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
1, 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".

At which point a cherubic face presses up against the window. It's
one of the Baker boys, Harry (Rigg has taken the boys out onto the
sand to play, but they're breaking away to make faces at their dad
through the glass.)

It prompts an unusual admission from Baker. "My biggest fear is
dying in a car accident. I don't ever want to die in transit, I want
to be somewhere," he reflects. But surely acting is a transitory
profession? "But for me what's important is making breakfast with
the kids, having a game of backgammon on a Saturday afternoon with
friends, they're the moments, the foundation I want my life to be
built on, not the shifting sands of popular opinion or box-office
receipts."

As I watch Baker leave, he strolls outside and gives Rebecca a long
hug, as though he's just returned from an extended trip. His boys
soon gather around and hug his legs. It's a picture of family bliss
that could bring a tear to your eye, and it recalls one of the
things Baker said to me: "At the end of the day, you just want to
have a laugh, right? Be happy with yourself and loved by your
family."

The Ring 2 opens this Thursday