The Australian-born thesp had previously appeared on the Eye series “The Guardian” and “Smith,” but didn’t pop in viewer minds until portraying Patrick Jane, a man whose bravado led to the murder of his wife and child by a mysterious serial killer known only as Red John. Despite his tragic past, Jane exhibits a lot of cheeky wit as he tracks down bad guys.

“He’s essentially a dark character, but instead of choosing to indulge in that dark torturous side, he has an optimistic take on life,” Baker explains. “From the pilot, the key to the character is that through his tragedy he has been freed. He’s not desperately hanging on to anything material and physical things, just living moment to moment.

“He’s completely flawed as you can be,” Baker continues. “That, coupled with the vulnerability of his character and that he’s so charming and entertaining, explains why there’s more mass appeal to the character than others I’ve done.”

As the smart aleck who’s invariably the smartest guy in the room, Patrick Jane suggests what Gregory House might’ve been like were he a cop and not such a jerk.

“Hugh Laurie defined the guy who marches to the beat of his own drum. A lot of the time, audiences are used to a Harvard-type protagonist, but guys like Hugh, Michael C. Hall (“Dexter”) and Bryan Cranston (“Breaking Bad”) helped redefine the archetype of protagonist as an anti-hero. My character goes along with that proud tradition.”

When Baker first moved to Los Angeles, he immediately landed a role in “L.A. Confidential.” He says that early success had him thinking his career would be smooth sailing, “only for a minute.”

“That’s the beautiful thing about Hollywood, the minute you get a leg up in confidence, you get hit over the head by something that knocks you back a few pegs,” he says. “To think, ‘This is really easy — I’ll do this movie and be successful’ — I thought like that for one job, and immediately got smacked over the head by mediocrity. I’ve been fighting back ever since. Mediocrity has the upper hand.”

What do you like most about your character?

“I like his balance of comedy and tragedy. That gives you more of a range of things to play, which is often a challenge on TV. There’s a certain bravery to him that’s very different from other characters on television. It’s not a macho bravado, it’s more in the private choices he makes to look at the more beautiful things in life. It’s a huge break for me as an actor.” [Source]

Gone are the days when being a leading man on television meant being the most likable guy onscreen. TV actors now get to show their skills with dark, complex characters — even on broadcast network shows. The Hollywood Reporter’s Ray Richmond and Matthew Belloni gathered six fine examples of TV’s new actor elite — Simon Baker (CBS’ “The Mentalist”), Bryan Cranston (AMC’s “Breaking Bad”), Laurence Fishburne (CBS’ “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”), Michael C. Hall (Showtime’s “Dexter”), Denis Leary (FX’s “Rescue Me”) and Bill Paxton (HBO’s “Big Love”) — to discus the grind of series work and the good fun in playing bad guys.

The Hollywood Reporter: You are all the leads on hourlong shows. What is the toll on your lives?

Bill Paxton: I drive from my house to make the call on Monday morning and I’m lucky to see my house before 2 o’clock in the morning on Friday night. It’s a monastic kind of existence. I just stay in a hotel out there (in Santa Clarita, Calif.). I feel like a weird monk. The hardest thing is to go from such an intense work situation to just all of a sudden, that’s it.

Bryan Cranston: What you’ll find (on) all of these shows, we’re all working 12 to 13 to 14 hours a day. If you can do a 12-hour day, you can go home and be with your family.

Simon Baker: Twelve hours, you can have an existence.

Denis Leary: On “Rescue Me,” we do four-, six-, eight-, 10-hour days. When (showrunner) Peter (Tolan) is directing, we do six-hour days sometimes.

Laurence Fishburne: How is that possible?

Leary: Because these actors have been there from the beginning. They are all really good at their characters and they’re fantastic with each other.

Baker: You just did five (seasons). We’re a first-year show, so part of the struggle is constantly trying to find the tone within the writers’ room (and with directors). Director A may be a fantastic director but doesn’t necessarily get the tone. We like to try to do a little bit of mucking around.

THR: Do you guys have a lot of freedom to shape the dialogue of your characters?

Fishburne: We’ve got a collaborative thing going on at “CSI.” There is always a writer on set. You can always say, “I think we need to tweak this.”

Michael C. Hall: When new people come in, if they only know me from the show they’re like, “I’m afraid you might kill me.” So they are a lot more open to my suggestions. (Laughter) And I don’t sway them from thinking that. But I try to honor what the writers write. And my job, first and foremost, is to try to make work what I see there. With the voiceover element, I probably have more to say.

THR: Do you ever worry about the moral lessons your characters are teaching people?

Paxton: I don’t think you can play a character with judgment. I don’t think that’s our place. We’re not the writers. Plus, we’re dealing with a sensitive religion in our show.

THR: Is there an ongoing tension on that front?

Paxton: Not really. We had a little bit of an episode recently where there was a temple rite that was dramatized for the first time in film or television. This stuff is all over YouTube, if you care to look. But this thing started before anyone had seen the episode. Enough people were upset (by that) that the Mormon church had to make a statement and HBO had to counter with an apology — and that was the week I was going to do my victory lap on all the talk shows.

Fishburne: It’s kind of polarizing for people?

Paxton: People look at the show and go, “OK, what is this?” Women, when I first told them I was doing the show, would literally step back away from me because they just aren’t going there. They think, “Wait a minute, this guy’s got how many wives?”

THR: Denis, you are sort of a hero to the firefighter community, even though your character is an insane person. What’s that about?

Leary: There are plenty of firefighters who don’t like what we portray. My character is based on two guys — one of them is a technical adviser on the show — and the crew is based on a particular crew. They all know almost every single fire, event, is taken from stuff from those guys. We wanted to do a school bus fire and I called Terry Quinn, our technical adviser, and he said: “I’m at one now, I’ll call you back.” So that’s where we get the fires. Even this year, we have a thing where one of the younger firefighters opens a bar with another firefighter, which actually comes from this crew. Their goal was to meet chicks. (Laughing) So there are chiefs that wouldn’t want us to tell this stuff, but that’s where the best stuff is. And I agree with Bill: I like the flawed people. And even as an audience member, you can’t really judge them.

Baker: They’re a very different world (on cable). We’re a network program. But there’s no way in the world I was going to sign on to a deal where the character was just one-dimension. Doing five seasons in a row, you’ve got to play a character that’s got a wrongness about him. There has to be some sort of issue and struggle for the character.

THR: Do you think it’s possible to really go to those dark places and flesh things out in the network context?

Cranston: They have to. They have to do what they’re doing now, because cable — with HBO leading the way years ago — changed the whole frontier. Look at Thomas Magnum (of “Magnum, P.I.”). Always did the right thing, always got the girl — the nice guy, never drank too much. Higgins was the role! (Laughter)

THR: Do you get a lot of feedback from people who cook drugs, saying “No, no, you’re doing it wrong”?

Cranston: No. We get it saying, “You’re doing it right.”

THR: Michael, your character doesn’t have any flaws. That’s got to be a problem for you.

Hall: His capacity for stress management is the most remarkable thing. (Laughs)

Baker: The challenge I often find is, I’m on a procedural show, but how do you balance the notion of character? You guys live in the world of character; that’s it. And you’ve got license and room to go with your character and find certain depths. (Whereas), networks are running scared. We want to do that, but we don’t want to offend the Christian right; we don’t want to offend these people. The biggest struggle I find (is) my show is 22 (episodes) a year. It’s personal, physical, emotional torture. There’s a reason why it’s 22, because the body won’t take 23.

THR: Do you venture a lot into cyberspace to see what people are saying about you?

Leary: I have all their names and all their e-mail addresses! (Laughter) I’m working on their home addresses.

Paxton: For some reason, I just couldn’t click over to the digital world. I just didn’t want to. I don’t read reviews either, because if you read the good ones you’ve got to believe them and then you’ve got to believe the bad ones, too. And I had an experience a few years ago when I directed a film and was really proud of it and the reviews just peeled me. I did a Terry Gross interview a couple months ago (on NPR’s “Fresh Air”). I wanted to hear the interview and I had to go on the Internet to hear it, and all of a sudden there were all these responses, and the first one was that I was an apologist for the polygamist movement in this country and I was just taking a big paycheck. It really upset me. It’s hard to separate the message from the messenger. We’re the front line, we’re the face of the thing.

Fishburne: For a lot of people, we really have become these characters that we play and it’s very difficult for people to kind of separate that. That’s really quite wonderful but it’s kind of hard.

THR: We’re assuming none of you Twitter.

Baker: I don’t even know what Twitter is. And I hear it all the time.

Leary: I can’t get the Twitter thing. Do you really need to know what the fuck Ashton Kutcher is doing with Demi Moore? I don’t like Shaq (O’Neal). I don’t need to know whatever the fuck he’s playing. (Laughter)

Cranston: I don’t pay attention to it. I don’t even look at the ratings. Just focus on what you do and go home. I work in Albuquerque, N.M., so I fly home every weekend and just spend time with the family and fly back on Sunday nights.

THR: What’s the craziest thing you’ve read about yourselves?

Leary: I’ve got a million. I got accused of having an aging lesbian eye surgery. Aging lesbian eye surgery — what does that mean? Unbelievable. Needless to say, I’ve never had the surgery. But actually I will at some point, if it makes me look like an aging lesbian and I need that part. There’s no guarantee. Maybe I’ll play Ellen DeGeneres. (Laughter)

Cranston: I don’t read anything, I don’t go online. I don’t read tabloids. No one says anything about me. No one knows anything about me.

THR: How did you pull that off?

Cranston: Because it’s not why I love to act. So I got what I wanted. I’m able to be this other guy and look completely different and just be in the woodwork. And nobody follows me. I don’t have any paparazzi, there’s nothing like that.

Paxton: You need a drug habit.

Cranston: I’ve been married for 20 years.

Paxton: That’s the problem right there.

THR: What is the best thing about fame? Or the worst?

Fishburne: One of the best things is getting good tables at restaurants. And when people are really genuinely complimentary about your work.

THR: Instead of being mistaken for someone else?

Fishburne: Even when they mistake you for somebody else, it’s cool.

Paxton: Dude, you were awesome in “Pulp Fiction”!

Fishburne: We all have that guy.

Leary: My guy is Willem Dafoe. I get mistaken for Willem Dafoe all the time.

Hall: Matt Damon.

Cranston: I don’t get anybody. I don’t look like anybody.

Baker: Fame. It’s weird. I’ve been an actor for 16 years. You’re not qualified to do anything. I didn’t go to school, I sold time-shares, I’ve worked in pubs. But you know what? I can pay the bills. My stepfather was a butcher, my old man was a mechanic, my mom worked at Kmart. I probably earn in a week more than what my family has ever earned in a year.

THR: Does it worry you to see actors being replaced by reality shows and NBC destroying the 10 o’clock –

Fishburne: I’ve got to stop you. I’ve really got to stop you. I’ve been an actor for, damn, 40 years, and it’s really hard to hear you say that we’ve been replaced by a reality TV show. It’s really hard to hear you say that. So you might want to rephrase that for me, man, please.

Hall: There’s also a proliferation of shows and networks. As television goes, there’s a lot more than was there back before reality programs existed.

Leary: I have nothing against Jay Leno, but that’s five hours of shows. If Jay’s thing works, they’re all going to want to do it. It kind of makes you think, “Shit, man.”

Cranston: I was reading something the other day about the girl who does this thing called “The Hills,” which I’ve never seen. And she was like, “I don’t want to do it anymore. They’ve followed me around for the last five years.” That would be my personal hell.

Simon Baker is on all fours, sniffing for clues. Literally. As The Mentalist’s unconventional investigator Patrick Jane, the 39-year-old actor is often called to stick his nose where it doesn’t belong. Today, he’s stuck it into the palm of a bloodied, dismembered hand. “It smells like almond moisturiser and tobacco,” he announces.

Relax. That hand is as fake as Jane’s old gig: conning people that he could speak to the dead.

It’s the opening scene of an episode entitled – what else – Red-Handed, in which Jane and the team from the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI) have to figure out how a man’s hand ended up on a desert highway near the California-Nevada border.

Actually, they are in Palmdale, California, an hour and change from Los Angeles, and there’s a small sandstorm brewing. After finishing a take, Baker returns to his folding chair, slips on his specs (he’s short-sighted) and describes today’s acting challenge. “It’s like talking on the back of a motorcycle with a helmet on,” he says. “The wind was so strong that the dead man’s hand was waving at me.”

Critics and audiences have given Baker and The Mentalist high praise since the first episode. The show, which screens locally on the Nine Network, is a top-10 hit in the US, averaging around 16 million viewers per episode. “It’s the kind of show people want to watch in hard times like this,” says its creator Bruno Heller. “The bad guys are going to get caught.”
And even though the often-cocky hero is a master manipulator seeking revenge and redemption for the murder of his own wife and daughter, he remains an intriguingly uplifting character. “He can be most honest when he’s lying and most dishonest when he is telling the truth,” says Heller. “He carries tragedy on his back, but it’s important to understand that when he is being mischievous, that’s a positive affirmation of life.”

It’s a role that requires natural charisma that just can’t be faked, Heller says, and Simon Baker has it in spades. “We were looking for a Cary Grant guy, and Simon was always top of the list. People like to be in his presence and the success the show has had so far is because of that. He is the team leader, but he doesn’t put on airs.”

Even on a rugged location, Baker shows no signs of stress or ego. After four hours of examining a hand in the middle of a dusty road, the affable actor sits under a canopy with the rest of the cast and crew, a big grin on his movie-star mug. “My life is pretty hectic, but I’m really into it,” he says.
“Here’s the weirdest part: I’m a devil and I finally found a role where I get paid to be a devil. People ask me, ‘How’s it going, mate?’ Are you f–king kidding me? I’m having a ball.”

Baker, a veteran of two other US dramas (The Guardian and 2007’s short-lived Smith), is already tight with his castmates. He regales co-star Robin Tunney, who plays tough CBI leader Teresa Libson, with the story of when Willem Dafoe played Jesus in The Last Temptation Of Christ and they had to have a “penis wrangler” on hand for the crucifixion scene to make sure that all of Dafoe stayed in his loincloth. Tunney looks up from her BlackBerry with a look of disbelief on her face. “It’s true,” says Baker. “I heard it from a make-up man who worked on the film.”

A week later, Baker is back at the Warner Bros lot where the CBI office scenes are shot. It’s 5pm – lunchtime in the world of TV – and he’s in his trailer eating a chicken salad. “Can I get you anything?” he asks. “I feel a little bit rude sitting here chowing down. Normally I’d be sleeping. Maybe I can lie on the couch after I’ve eaten and pretend this is therapy.”

Sounds like a plan, except Baker isn’t one of those actors who like to go on and on about their childhood. But interrogation does yield some results. He was born on July 30, 1969, in Launceston, Tasmania. At two, his parents separated. Baker and his older sister moved to Lennox Head on the NSW North Coast with his mum and stepfather, who then had a son of their own. There were other half-siblings on Baker’s father’s side, but it was hardly The Brady Bunch. “More like the plot of a bad B-movie,” says Baker, who had problems with his stepfather and didn’t see his birth father again until he was 18. “One day I might write an autobiography and that section will be very interesting,” he says, smiling. “It’s very complicated.”
Growing up by the beach was idyllic for a kid who started surfing at seven, even in a community where there were six guys to every girl. “There was some pretty savage chest-thumping,” he recalls, “and I had my share of fights. I used to try to talk my way out of it with logic and they’d get confused and punch me.”

Although Baker identified with the surfers, he hung out with everyone at school: the science nerds, the tough guys and, of course, the girls. “They called me the ‘ping-pong ball’ because I bounced around a lot.” He was “moderately intelligent”, but not a good student. “I was sportistic,” says Baker. “I couldn’t pay attention in class; all I thought about was sports.”
He started acting for an audience of one. “I would skateboard down the driveway and occasionally when my mum was at the kitchen window, I’d do a fake fall and lie there on the ground until she would start screaming,” he says. “It was a childish, negative way to get attention and it worked.”
His mother, who watched Jerry Lewis and James Bond movies on TV with young Simon and is now a drama teacher, had a theatrical streak that she employed as a plain-clothes security guard at the local Kmart. “She would walk around pretending she was shopping for stuff and spying on people,” he says, demonstrating with a coy and hilarious pantomime.

When asked about his first professional gig, Baker plops down on the trailer floor and re-enacts his role as “the triple-choc kid” in a commercial for Drumstick ice-cream cones. “They kept giving me a spit bucket and I didn’t use it. I thought, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m eating this!’” He gets off the floor, busting up with laughter. “I’m really f–king up my chances of scoring myself a Woody Allen type of film.”

In his early 20s, Baker met his future wife, actress Rebecca Rigg, and was soon co-starring with her in the soap E Street. He played an earnest young cop and she was his girlfriend. “We were the feuding couple and I remember after every take I’d get so caught up in it, I’d be like, ‘Honey, are you all right? Are we OK?” Soon, they set their sights on Hollywood. “We had a young daughter, Stella, and enough money to eat for about two months,” recalls Baker. Happily, he was cast in the 1997 hit film LA Confidential. They put down roots in Malibu – “I’ve got to live near the coast” – and had two boys, Claude, 9, and Harry, 7.

Although they hung out with other “old-school” Aussies, including Nicole Kidman and “this little girl named Naomi Watts who could barely get arrested”, the Bakers yearned to return home. A few years ago they bought a house in Australia. “I never unpacked my suitcase,” says Baker, who flew seven times in five months to work on two romantic comedies, Something New and The Devil Wears Prada.

He doesn’t find it particularly difficult raising a family predominantly in Hollywood. “I don’t like the idea of talking down to kids. I think I was talked down to and you rebel against that. I try to be straightforward and honest with my kids and I believe nothing beats good old hard work.”
In The Guardian, he played a hotshot lawyer sentenced to work with a children’s services agency. “It was a depressing character,” he says. “He had issues with his father. I fought a lot on that show and took myself a little too seriously.”

In The Mentalist, Baker often bonds with children involved in the cases. “My character looks at everything in a different way and having kids gives you a direct link into that,” he says. “The connection Jane has with kids is a kinship. It’s games, it’s play and that’s what separates Jane from his emotions.”

Baker’s research into psychic phenomenon has also enhanced his performance. “I’ve seen the odd tarot reader and had my palm read in various countries and explained to me in many strains of broken English. Did I believe a word? To be honest, I didn’t understand much, but I loved watching the presentation.”

Looking around Baker’s trailer, it seems like an appropriate time to channel the Mentalist’s powers of observation. On the bulletin board is a photo of a flashy 1960s sports car – Jane’s ride in The Mentalist. “It’s a Citroen DS 21,” says Baker, eyes lighting up. “I’ve always coveted them myself. I just didn’t see my character in a brand-new car. You may have noticed he catches rides with other people because his car is always in the shop, but I will get to drive it.”

OK then, what is the significance of a playing card and a pair of 3D glasses clipped to the curtain with a peg? “The glasses are from a surfing magazine I had in the bathroom,” explains Baker. “And one day the lighting department clipped a playing card to the front fork of my bicycle so it makes a v-r-r-r-r-r sound when I ride.” Upon closer inspection, the card turns out to be most appropriate for Patrick Jane and Simon Baker. That’s right: it’s the joker. [SOURCE]