The Americans, in my opinion, is the best show on television. And I am not alone.
It's incredibly well-acted, and this season in particular, it's cool to see actors with strong Texas pedigrees filling out its exemplary cast.
Margo Martindale, who hails from Jacksonville in the Piney Woods of East Texas, and whom I profiled here, has appeared in one episode this season and will, I'm guessing, appear in others. She won an Emmy in 2015 -- Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series -- for her role as a Soviet spy in The Americans. And in 2011, she won an Emmy as Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, for her role in another FX drama, Justified.
But this year, we have another actor with a strong Texas connection appearing in The Americans. The terrific character, Dylan Baker, was born in Syracuse, N.Y., but graduated from Southern Methodist University. He plays, for lack of a better description, a pathogen delivery guy working for the KGB. Baker has also appeared in The Good Wife, as did Martindale. Baker also played Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) in the recent HBO film, Confirmation, about the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas case.
Even Kerri Russell, the female lead on The Americans, has a Texas connection: Born in Fountain Valley, Calif., she and her family lived for a while in Coppell during her childhood. They moved frequently because of her dad's career as a Nissan Motors executive.
Here's a profile I wrote of Dylan Baker back in 2001:
There was a moment during Dylan Baker's days at Southern Methodist University when he changed his personal appearance -- so much so that he startled his teacher, who suggests it may have been a turning point.
Margaret Loft describes Mr. Baker, the undergraduate, as "gangly, very sweet, funny, dear. I always thought of him as a tangle of legs and shy talk and then one day..."
Mr. Baker, now 42, waltzed into class absent his corrective eyewear, thus revealing "the startling blue of his eyes. And I said, 'Dylan, you're a leading man!'" Ms. Loft recalls with a laugh. "'I see it! I have just seen it!' I had never had that experience with a student. I tell him now I saw the future of him."
The future that Ms. Loft envisioned has turned out to be a remarkable present. Twenty years later, Mr. Baker can be seen at your local multiplex, playing President John F. Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in Thirteen Days, the thriller about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
He appeared opposite Jennifer Lopez in The Cell, shared the screen with Harrison Ford in Random Hearts and conspired with Demi Moore in Disclosure. He was a highly touted regular on Steven Bochco's short-lived television series Murder One and on CBS' Feds.
But the leading man Ms. Loft envisioned is primarily a character on stage, the world Mr. Baker first cultivated at SMU and the world he loves most.
"I love doing plays," says Mr. Baker, whose narrow, angular face and startling blues are punctuated by a distinctive voice Ms. Loft says she could recognize instantly even if she were blind.
Mr. Baker jokingly says even his good friends fail to realize that he does theater "for the money." But many of his pals say he could find his way to a stage if pay for plays were eliminated forever.
He confesses they're probably right. "I've been in some plays I haven't enjoyed," he says, "but I have to say that I rarely find the time in front of any audience less than inspiring."
He recently finished a production of What the Butler Saw off-Broadway in New York City, his adopted hometown, where he lives with his wife, actress Becky Ann Baker, their 7-year-old daughter, Willa, and two dogs, Lucky and Daisy.
Despite being ensconced in Manhattan, he ventures often to Hollywood for film and television work, which he admits pays the bills with infinitely greater ease than his work in front of the footlights. One day of work on a bad movie will, he says, pay more than "the entire run of a great play."
Movies also bring a recognition that most plays, no matter how well conceived or lavishly reviewed, simply can't. Mr. Baker astonished audiences and wowed critics in 1998 with his performance in Happiness, a Todd Solondz film in which he plays Bill Maplewood, a highly respected psychiatrist who is, in reality, a pedophile who
preys on young boys.He won the National Board of Review Performance Award and the Perry Ellis Breakthrough Award for a searing portrayal that, in the words of the New York Times, he executed "brilliantly and bravely."
"I most admire him for Happiness," Ms. Loft says. "I was a little bit thunderstruck by it. He played it with such dignity, grace, compassion. ... He didn't demean the role in any way, and your heart just aches in the final scene."
Mr. Baker describes the Happiness experience as "a total joy going to work each day. Todd Solondz was a fascinating guy to work with. I knew when I read the script that it was the best script I had ever been given to read. He knew exactly what Happiness was going to be, and there are so many little gems in every moment of that movie."
His friends say Happiness underscores what they knew all along - that Mr. Baker is a highly versatile actor with extraordinary range and depth. They rave about his leading role in Broadway's La Bete. They observe that the same actor has played a curmudgeonly newspaper editor, a hard-bitten cop and the villain in Tartuffe. Not to mention Robert McNamara, whom many assail as the architect
of the Vietnam War."Let me tell you about Dylan Baker," says Chris Noth, whose own career has included lead roles on NBC's Law and Order and as Mr. Big on HBO's Sex and the City.
As a classmate at the Yale School of Drama -- where Mr. Baker obtained a master of fine arts degree after graduating from SMU in 1981 -- Mr. Noth came to admire his quiet but talented classmate.
"So I waltz in, thinking, 'I'm gonna do a bunch of leading-man parts.' Fat chance. I get stuck with the character parts, and he's doing all the leading parts," Mr. Noth recalls. "He happens to be an incredible actor who's extremely versatile," whether in a leading role or working as a "character actor," a label he's increasingly stuck with.
What many fail to realize, Mr. Noth says, is that "every role is a character role, so that's really a false distinction. Even if you're a so-called 'leading man,' you're a character actor playing a character. The only thing I really have to say to Dylan is, 'Hey, leave some parts for me.' "
Mr. Noth marveled at his friend's star turn in La Bete, which Jamie Richards, a classmate of Mr. Baker's at SMU and now a member of New York City's Ensemble Studio Theatre, calls nothing less than astounding.
"The whole play was written in rhyming couplets as a Restoration comedy, and Dylan was absolutely hilarious in it," she says. "He had this huge curly wig on, and he walked around with a live parrot on his arm. He worked the parrot to death. He kept turning around and looking at the bird, and the parrot kept pecking at his wig. The [New York] theater community just went insane for it, but the
critics hated it and killed it."Focus is something Ms. Richards remembers from SMU, where her classmate was "very down-to-earth. He was always able to do work that required a certain level of technical proficiency. He had a great comedic personality, but he's always been so centered. Even back then, when we were all so dramatic, running around with everything being a big trauma, Dylan was the one who was always so ... focused. He knew exactly what he wanted to do."
Jack Clay, now retired and living in Seattle, was one of Mr. Baker's professors. He puts him at the top of a long list of talents to have come from SMU, including Kathy Bates, Powers Boothe and Patricia Richardson (of television's Home Improvement), as well as playwrights Beth Henley and Jack Heifner.
"A career in show business is a dicey and cruel thing," Mr. Clay says, "so you've got to have the kind of gumption and patience and focus that Dylan always had. And which he really demonstrated once he got out in the business. It's very unpredictable, and many students lack the discipline to make it a career. It's hard and it takes years, but Dylan has gone right at it."
Mr. Clay got to teach Mr. Baker largely by accident. Born in Syracuse, N.Y., Mr. Baker moved with his family to Lynchburg, Va., when he was a baby, and there he was raised as the youngest of five children. His father, a polio survivor who walked with a leg brace, worked as a corporate lawyer for General Electric.
Dylan Baker's mom, who shared her husband's profession, worked for 25 years as a pro-bono lawyer, offering legal aid to Lynchburg's most impoverished people. She and her husband also valued education. So as a teenager, Mr. Baker was dispatched to Georgetown Preparatory School in Rockville, Md., where he graduated in 1976.
He began college at William & Mary, where he developed a passion for acting. But believing his talents would be honed better somewhere else, he hit the open road in search of a "quality program." He bought a bus pass that took him to the farthest reaches of the Deep South and, finally, to Dallas.
"And so I ended up at SMU on a very cold day. There I was, just walking around," he recalls. "It was Christmas break, so no one was there. But it looked impressive, and I found a couple of people to talk to about it. Eventually, it started snowing really hard."
Mr. Baker found himself stranded in Dallas, in the middle of an ice storm that shut down the city. Dallas' nasty weather may have been SMU's gain. Now, Mr. Baker is a distinguished alumnus who Mr. Clay contends will continue to have work even as an elderly man, so rich are his abilities. In the coming months, he will appear with Morgan Freeman in Along Came a Spider and in the John Boorman film Tailor
of Panama, as well as A Gentleman's Game, sharing the lead with budding star Mason Gamble, who is only 14.After leaving SMU, Mr. Baker ended up in Williamstown, Mass., playing Blythe Danner's lover in Undiscovered Country. He quickly became friends with Ms. Danner, her husband, Bruce Paltrow, and with their children, one of whom was a spry tot named Gwyneth Paltrow.
"It's fair to say I hardly ever see little Gwyneth any more," he says with a laugh. "What a star she's become."
The same can be said for Mr. Baker's good friend, Allison Janney, a fellow denizen of the stage, and now a regular on NBC's hit The West Wing. Would Mr. Baker love to duplicate Ms. Janney's good fortune?
"Oh, you betcha," says this lover of the stage. "To be on the best show in television ... yes! If a situation like that came along, I'd love it. George Clooney did 10 pilots before he did ER, but the 10th one happened to be ER. The stage is wonderful, film is wonderful, but would I love for the same situation to happen to me? Of course."
His friends say they easily can see it happening ... even if he chooses to wear glasses.
Here's the official trailer for Season 4 of The Americans:
