The Endearing Blue Shades of Simon Baker

In a courtyard lined with orange trees, Simon Baker, the Australian actor most known for his lead role in the series, The Mentalist, sat facing Marrakech’s afternoon sun with his dark glasses on.

A furry gray cat, one of hotel La Mamounia’s 30-odd feline residents, prowled under the table as Baker talked to groups of journalists about his role in Limbo. In indigenous Australian director Ivan Sen’s black-and-white ‘desert noir’ Limbo, which was screened at the Marrakech International Film Festival, Baker plays the lead character, detective Travis Hurley.

“So have you seen the film?” Baker, dressed in a blue shirt and khaki pants, asked as the second group of journalists began settling down around him with their recorders, mikes, notebooks and phones.

“Yes! It’s soooo…” I said.

“So what?”

“It’s so different and… you’re so hot.”

“Hooooo! You’re so funny,” Baker laughed, “And moving right along,” he added in the same breath, ignoring the inappropriate compliment and focusing instead on answering an actual question from another journalist about what it was like to get into the character of detective Hurley, who arrives in a desolate Australian mining town to investigate a 20-year-old unsolved murder of an Aboriginal girl.  

“I enjoyed it. It was a darkish character,” Baker said in a heavy Australian accent.

Baker, an avid surfer, begins all his responses slowly, taking long pauses, as if he’s waiting for thoughts to form and then looks for the right words to articulate them. Once he’s got it, he lets words and emotions flow, gliding easily from professional to personal. 

Baker calls Ivan Sen — who didn’t just direct Limbo, but also wrote, shot, edited and composed the background score for it — “a pure auteur.” And to prepare for the role of Hurley, Baker says he spent time at his “little property in Australia” where he keeps cows and mows the lawn. It was while doing a bit of gardening that he thought of why Hurley was the way he was, how his emotional unavailability, and the “idea of armor or shell” could be manifested physically, on the screen.

Limbo, shot in Coober Pedy, a South Australian town known as “the opal capital of the world,” is a stunning but visually sparse film with a lot of debris — emotional and terrestrial. Hurley’s silence and his brooding demeanor are inscrutable, but when he takes his shirt off, his tattooed body looks like a map pointing to the many demons he carries inside.

“It was a guy that had a lot of personal armor. Most people who have a lot of personal armor are incredibly vulnerable beneath that armor,” Baker said of Hurley while viewing the world and people around him through his dark glasses. To him, we are all shades of black and grey. 

Simon Baker, 54, is strikingly, distractingly handsome. His golden-brown beard matches his hair except for a few white strands, and when he laughs, his cheekbones pop up and his eyes seem to emit smiling rays.

In Limbo, Baker has an unkind buzzcut, barely smiles and is unrecognizable as Travis Hurley.

Professionally, Baker seems to be in a happy place. “At the moment I’m just sort of enjoying having a little bit of a renaissance of acting again for myself,” he said and talked with palpable joy about taking time to immerse himself in characters, rather than having to wear them showily, as he did for over 20 years in Los Angeles. 

“I’ve been through a lot in the last few years, as everyone has in Covid… My marriage broke down… and I’ve found a deeper connection with myself through acting. I’m sort of excited about exploring that a bit more… I’m a man of an age now where I can play characters, proper characters, and I want to play around with that,” he said.  

Limbo was in competition for the Golden Bear, the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival.

Baker, who began his acting career in Australia with commercials and then moved to serials, moved to the United States in the mid-Nineties. Though he bagged a small part in the 1997 classic, LA Confidential, he found a sustainable career in TV series where, after 67 episodes of The Guardian in which he played a corporate attorney sentenced to 1,500 hours of community service, he starred in The Mentalist as an investigator chasing a serial killer for seven seasons, reportedly earning $350,000 per episode at one point.

“In America what generally happens, unless you are Christian Bale or the two-three actors that get to play characters is… you do a film that is successful and [then] any role that resembles that, they’re interested in you for that,” Baker said, laughing ironically.

After he played Christian Thompson, the sexy writer in The Devil Wears Prada, he says, there were many offers to play characters that were “somewhat of a prat.”

But Baker, who calls himself “a snob” when it comes to cinema, says the reason he started acting in the first place was his “secret desire to connect with people. Because that’s what cinema did for me when I was a kid. I felt connected.” 

In Hollywood, Baker, who has famously not watched the Meryl Streep-Anne Hathaway starrer, could no longer connect with the films he was doing, and he was no longer interested in series like The Mentalist whose each episode, he says, had 600-700 cuts to “trick you into the very, very, very short attention span.”  

That’s why he moved back to Australia in 2015, to focus on “his artistic needs and desires,” to “work with filmmakers who were willing to take risks” and on projects that connected “me back to my country.” 

He began by testing himself — as an actor, director and truth-teller.  

Baker directed his first film, Breath, in 2017. Based on a novel of the same name by Tim Winton, in the film Baker played a surfer named Sando who trains but also repeatedly, sadistically, challenges two young boys to test their limits — physical and emotional — often by playing one against the other. Eventually, Sando picks one, takes him along on surfing trips, while the other, Pikelet, is left behind with his wife who abuses him sexually.

During a two-hour-long master class at the Marrakech Film Festival, Baker was in form till he was asked why he decided on that story as his directorial debut. The question made him well up, and he had to pause to compose himself. 

“I’m a little bit emotional actually,” he began, drawing an affectionate applause as he recovered on-stage slowly.

“It was how I grew up… The obstacles of fear and self-doubt and identity,” he began, choked up again, and then continued, “I remember when I was 14-15, all of these people existed in my life… A big part of finding my identity and strength was through surfing. And just like that boy, Pikelet, I struggled with fear.”  

Baker said he directed Breath to try to subvert that very Australian “male, macho archetype,” to honor his own “personal sensitivity,” but also because films have often helped him understand “who I am and what I’m feeling”.

At the Marrakech International Film Festival last week, Baker was feeling the blues.