Simon Baker

Somewhere in the middle of Margin Call (2011), a dozen well-paid people are trying to work out how frightened to be, and Simon Baker's Jared Cohen is not one of them. He is the young executive who has already decided what the firm will do and is waiting, politely, to be asked. Baker plays him with his hands still and his voice level, and it is the level voice that does the damage: he sounds like the calmest man in the building, and he is the one nobody should trust. That is the thing Baker does. He looks affable and he watches, and somewhere in the watching you realise he has understood the situation faster than you have.

He learned the trade in Australian soaps, E Street (1992–1993) among them, then moved to the United States and made his film debut as Matt Reynolds in L.A. Confidential (1997). Television gave him his leads: Nicholas Fallin in The Guardian (2001–2004) and then Patrick Jane in The Mentalist (2008–2015), the part that made him known everywhere and asked him, every week for seven years, to be charming and slightly wounded and to notice things before anyone else did. He was good at it. The film work of those years was thinner, and the parts, The Devil Wears Prada (2006) for instance, were written for his face rather than for anything he might do with it.

Then he went home. He directed and starred in Breath (2017), and since then has taken supporting parts in Australian films and series, Limbo (2023), Boy Swallows Universe (2024), The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2025), where the affability is gone and what is left is austere and a little haunted. Scarpetta (2026) brings him back to American television as Benton Wesley, which he has described as "sort of a very quiet character in amongst a lot of quite big forward characters". That is accurate, and it is also the problem. The series is pulled between two timelines, Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis bickering is the only thing holding it together, and a quiet man in the corner is easy to lose. Hunter Parrish, playing the younger Wesley, gets even less to do.

We went into Margin Call for Jeremy Irons and Paul Bettany and came out thinking about Cohen, because Baker had made a man with no visible feelings the one we could not stop reading for them. That is a harder trick than the one The Mentalist asked of him, and he is better at it. He has said of the later work that it is a relief not to carry the story, and the work agrees with him. Put him at the head of the table and he will be charming. Put him at the far end of it and he will be dangerous, and that is the Baker worth seeking out.