Simon Baker is a self-confessed TV snob, and it took Scarpetta to lure back him to American TV

After Simon Baker filmed a role in Taika Waititi’s next film, Klara and the Sun, he got a call that no actor wants to get.

His role had been cut. “Taika sent me a text and he called me, and in his way, it was very witty and beautiful,” Baker tells The Nightly. “I remember sitting there going, ‘Wow, I’m so glad this happened to me in my 50s when I can have a laugh about it’.

“As opposed to maybe in my 20s, when it would have just crushed me. I would’ve thought, ‘I’m not that good, I’m terrible’.”

Baker is not the same man that after his first act as a dreamy local soap star in E Street, Home and Away and Heartbreak High, chased his dream to Hollywood, where he would breakthrough in L.A. Confidential before film roles in the likes of The Devil Wears Prada and then a long-running stint as the lead of crime procedural The Mentalist.

There are distinct chapters to Baker’s career, and it was this third era, the post-Mentalist years that have been the most interesting to watch.

Baker has always had a commanding but effortless screen presence but perhaps his dramatic chops had been overlooked because of his, well, for lack of a better-term, his movie-star good looks.

It’s easy enough to be distracted by the tussle of the blonde hair and the charming smile that extends to the corners of his blue-green eyes.

After The Mentalist wrapped in 2015, he came home to Australia because he wanted to do something different, something more.

“That show I did in the States went for seven seasons. I was constantly trying to get some sort of artistic relevance into that as much as possible,” he says.

“But at the same time, I knew what it was. You’ve got to build the building that you’re building and exist with that.

“I came back and made my own film and I was looking to work on projects that I felt had some sort of emotional resonance for me.”

It started with Breath, the 1970s surfing drama adapted from Tim Winton’s book, which Baker directed, co-wrote and starred in, but it didn’t end there.

There was also High Ground, a raw Australian film about Indigenous dispossession, and Blaze, a fantastical drama directed by the artist Del Kathryn Barton, in which he played the father of a 12-year-old girl who witnesses a sexual assault.

There were crucial roles in prestigious Australian series Boy Swallows Universe and The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Baker said he’s found creative freedom in playing the supporting characters that he can help shape from the side, but, if you’ve been paying attention, it was as the lead in Ivan Sen’s exquisite neo-noir-neo-western Limbo that really captures his evolved artistic sensibilities.

As Travis, a weary cop sent to an outback community and charged with reviewing an investigation into the disappearance of a young Indigenous woman some years ago, Baker’s performance is quiet and understated, but it pulses with the resigned energy of inevitable injustice.

It’s exacting and it’s considered, but never laboured.

His name and profile helped with financing some of those smaller Australian films, and he was interested in “trying to work on things that were maybe taking a few more risks and challenging people’s ideas a bit”.

After a decade out of American TV, it was always going to take a lot to lure Baker back into that world.

“There’s been a lot of stuff I could’ve done there, but there was never anything that I was kind of like, ‘OK, this is interesting, I like the take on this, or there’s something new about this in the form’,” Baker says.

Then Scarpetta came along.

The crime drama is an adaptation of Patricia Cornwall’s novels, centred on a sharp forensic pathologist, Kay Scarpetta, and stars Nicole Kidman, Jamie Lee Curtis, Bobby Cannavale, Ariana DeBose, and Baker.

It’s set across two timelines, the present day and 28 years earlier, and the connection between two murders that shouldn’t be linked and yet, is.

“I thought this was quite ambitious, and I think this is a richly layered show, and I’m curious to see how audiences respond to it because I think it’s quite good,” he says.

Baker is a self-admitted snob when it comes to TV. Perhaps it was the 24-episodes-a-year grind of working on an American network series for so long when around him, the form was really coming into its artistic powers.

That made him a lot pickier about what he does and doesn’t have time for, both as an actor and as a viewer.

“I’m a bit snobby about TV stuff, which sounds interesting given I was on The Mentalist, which was sort of straight-up free-to-air fodder. But in this day and age, when shows like Chernobyl had come out, and you’ve got these great prestige series, I’m in for that, I’m all about that,” he explains.

Baker hadn’t read the Cornwall books, but his mother had, and since he started shooting the series, she’s re-read all of them. “She’s mad for them, I keep having to sort of tell her it may be different to the books.”

In Scarpetta, Baker plays Benton Wesley, a FBI profiler and Kay’s husband. He comes from money and has a killer investigative instinct. But, in the first two episodes, he doesn’t give much away.

The character is a dark horse, and in the first two episodes, he barely speaks when everyone around him is shouting, often literally.

“Because all the other characters, other than Benton, express their every thought and idea, and Benton is quietly in the corner,” he says.

“That excites me, because I can do something with this, as long as it’s supported by the director and the production, and that’s what the intention is.”

Sometimes silence can be loud, and when you’re watching those first two episodes, you know there’s something roiling beneath Benton’s seemingly composed exterior – because you don’t cast Baker as set dressing, and you know he’s not going to do it unless there was something else going on.

“As soon as I spoke to (series creator) Liz (Sarnoff), I understood that the character was a slow-burn character, and it’s a very, very contrasting character to a lot of the other main characters,” he recalls.

Baker holds Sarnoff in great regard, and when the production wrapped on season one (the series has already been renewed for a second instalment), he told his showrunner that he felt he had the best role in the show.

“I just felt like it’s been a really good experience because we worked through this thing together,” he says. “I mean, she didn’t reveal to me what her ideas were completely, but we’re able to sort of play around with it, and there’s intention with that character that exists.

“I really like Liz. She’s a really good writer, and she’s an awesome person, and I like the way she thinks creatively, and my working relationship with her was fantastic.”

There was also the draw of working with that top-tier cast, including Kidman with whom Baker had briefly shared a screen, also as husband and wife, in an Australian-filmed episode of the pandemic-era Apple TV anthology series, Roar.

Baker has been in a position in the past when he’s read a script and seen something promising in the story, only to then arrive on set and realise that’s not the how everyone else sees it.

He was so relieved and satisfied that wasn’t the case with Sarnoff and Scarpetta.

“I’m always interested in seeing something that works in a new and different way,” he says.

“I don’t mind it when it’s in a familiar genre, but when they do it in a way that makes you go, ‘Oh, that’s a different take on it’, because then I know people have thought about it, and it’s considered.”

Scarpetta is on Prime Video on Wednesday, March 9