Thanks for sending this along, Franziska!

Actor Simon Baker will earn $430,000 for each episode of The Mentalist according to a new deal, making him the highest paid actor in a US TV drama. The Australian star will eclipse Hugh Laurie of the House and Laurence Fishburn in CSI .

The sex symbol tag does not sit easily with Simon Baker.

The 41-year-old actor, named by TV Guide as the Sexiest Man Alive, has admitted that he has some reservations about the label.

‘The older you get, the heavier things become to lift,’ he explained to the Daily Telegraph.

‘So it just gets a little heavier to drag around, that’s all, mate.’

How does his 17-year-old daughter Stella feel about his hunk status?

‘She understands how the whole machine works. She knows it wasn’t me who came up with the tag,’ Baker said. [source]

SIMON BAKER may project the Aussie spirit through and through, but the actor is planning to become an American.

The star of The Mentalist has been living in Los Angeles for 13 years with his actress wife Rebecca Rigg and three children.

Barack Obama’s ascension to the presidency encouraged him to apply for American citizenship, although he will not relinquish his Australian passport.

”The only reason I haven’t done it already is I’m a huge procrastinator,” he told The Sun-Herald. ”Both my sons [Claude, 12, and Harry, 9] were born in America so they have dual citizenship.”

Baker, who turns 41 in a fortnight, said his children were Australian without trying. ”I bring them home whenever I can but in LA we’re an Aussie household,” he said.

”Sure we do the Tim Tams and Vegemite thing, but being Aussie is just about being real. No airs and graces. Our family is normal.”

As normal as it can be when dad’s an international heart-throb and the children’s godparents are the Hollywood stars Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts.

”To me they’re not famous friends, they are just friends.”

Baker flew in for Friday’s soiree at the Museum of Contemporary Art to promote Samsung’s new campaign slogan, ”Turn On Tomorrow”. So what turns him on?

”My imagination turns me on,” he said. Baker has a similar effect on millions of women around the globe, to the eternal discomfort of his 17-year-old daughter, Stella. ”She’s not impressed with the sex-symbol thing – but I think it would be strange if she didn’t think that,” he said. [source]