Simon Baker turns on the charm offensive in Amazon Prime’s new series, ‘Scarpetta’
By 
SIMON BAKER has a warning. Don’t let the genteel niceties of his character in the new Prime Video series Scarpetta fool you.
“Don’t be deceived by the Southern thing,” Baker says of his character, Benton Wesley. “It’s all very polite. I feel like there is a bit of danger to it.”
Baker may not agree with this particular assessment, but the 56-year-old shares much of his character’s manner in real life. When we meet at one of Bondi Beach’s local hotels, he’s head-to-toe in blue and sporting an eye-catching IWC Schaffhausen. It’s been almost a year to the date since he graced the cover of our April Issue in 2025, but he still recalls the names of our team as we set up.
Baker’s measured, affable charm – a balance of the surfer’s stereotypical chill with the thespian considered nature – seems to be the perfect building block for Wesley’s own inner tensions.
Adapted from the best-selling book series written by Patricia Cornwell, Baker’s Wesley is an FBI criminal profiler married to the eponymous Dr Kay Scarpetta, played by Nicole Kidman.
Both are driven, dedicated to their work and, for appearances, to each other. But there’s also a sense that, even in the first few episodes, their marriage is as much a game of chess as it is one of love.
For Baker, it was this subtle nature of Benton himself that first caught his attention when reading the scripts.
“The character was the primary thing that drove me,” he says. “It’s sort of a very quiet character in amongst a lot of quite big forward characters. So there’s a drama that exists within that character of Benton.
“He’s such a slow-burn personality among a mob of characters that are far more boisterous. The Scarpetta family, they’re Italian and everything is really expressive. And that’s a dynamic on its own, seeing Nicole and Jamie Lee [Curtis] go at it as bickering sisters.”
What might surprise fans of the book series is how the show weaves humour into the dark nature of its plot. Without losing any of the tension that underpins the source material. Not that it’s a laugh track by any means, but it does have a The Bear-esque quality to some of its scenes, especially all those involving the barbs thrown between Kidman and Curtis (who, coincidentally, also starred in The Bear).
The show’s premise sits across two timelines, starting with Kidman’s Scarpetta as she returns to her role as Virginia’s Chief Medical Examiner and begins investigating a murder that appears disturbingly similar to a case from nearly three decades earlier. The eight-part series moves between these two cases, shifting between the present day and the 1990s to reveal how past investigations continue to shape the characters now.
The opening line in Episode One is, as they say, a killer:
“Sorry to wake you Doc. There’s been a murder. At Dangerfield, on the train tracks.”
One of the more unusual aspects of filming the series was how little Baker chose to know about the broader story. Rather than reading every script in advance, he deliberately limited what he saw so that his performance stayed grounded in Benton’s perspective.
“I like to sort of keep guessing a little bit,” he says.
In fact, Baker only read portions of the later episodes while filming.
“It’s eight episodes. I only read my stuff in the last two episodes because I didn’t want to know,” he explains. “I didn’t want to know what everyone else’s experience was, or what they were commenting on in regards to the story.”
By doing that, he avoided allowing future plot developments to influence the character’s earlier decisions.
“I only wanted my character’s experience of that,” he says. “I didn’t want any of those other ideas to influence the choices that I made as an actor.”
It also means Baker will be discovering the final moments of the season at roughly the same time as the audience.
“I’ve seen six episodes,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t really know what happens in the last two. I’ll find out with the rest of you!”
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