Breaking Bad was huge for actor Charles Baker, who played the recurring character “Skinny Pete” on the Emmy-winning television drama.

“It changed everything for me,” Baker says. “I was the dumb, funny guy on the best drama on television,” he says, which opened up plenty of opportunities.

Thing is, most of those opportunities were for basically the same role.

“It kind of became the paradigm that I’m the drug addict,” he says. “It’s hard to get out of that. A lot of producers don’t want to have to be creative about their choices. They want to just look at a picture and say, ‘Yeah, that’s our drug addict. Yeah, that’s our lead guy.’

“It’s a business,” he continues, “so they want to be sure that what you’ll be doing is what you know how to do – that you fit that mold.”

But Baker and Skinny Pete are completely different characters.

“I am a family guy,” Baker says. “I have a wife and kids … and I wanted people to see that in me.”

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Because independent films can earn publicity and facilitate distribution by casting name actors, they can be more willing to accommodate those performers in different types of roles.

That’s how he ended up in Arizona in December, talking to me on the set of the sci-fi comedy Eleven Eleven. Writer/director Chris Redish shot the film over three weeks in Phoenix and Sedona.

Redish confirms the need for name actors, saying he’s surveyed film distributors at trade events about what makes a film marketable. “Ninety percent of the answers were ‘cast.’ Second place was Christmas. They said they could never get enough Christmas films. But story and genre and all of those other things were lower down the list. The No. 1 thing they look for is the cast.”

Baker came up on Redish’s radar thanks to a connection between the film’s Los Angeles casting director and the actor’s manager.

“There was no decision on our side,” Redish recalls. “I’ve been a Breaking Bad fan for years. I just love that show, so I knew his character already. As soon as we heard that there was just a chance that he might take it, it was like ‘Oh, absolutely. We’ve got to do anything we can to get him.’

“We found out later that he had a strong feeling he wanted to work with us,” Redish adds. “We didn’t know that at the time.”

Landing Baker provided the needed buzz.

“He started posting on Facebook and Twitter about it,” the director says. “We started getting a lot of ‘likes’ on Facebook. We started getting lots of attention.”

‘Eleven Eleven’

 In Eleven Eleven, Baker plays the lead role, Tim Faris.

“He’s a bit of a Trekkie,” Baker says. “He has his own business giving UFO tours in Sedona, Ariz., the UFO capital of the country. He’s a very devoted family man [but] he has some dark secrets – some Close Encounters kind of stuff that he wants people to believe. But nobody believes him.”

Baker received the script from his manager and says he was in love with it from the moment he read it.

“It’s like they knew that this was what I was looking for,” he says. “It was kismet. It was so perfect for the time. They wanted someone who had some recognition, and – thanks to [Breaking Bad stars] Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul – people recognize me now.”

In Eleven Eleven, Baker’s character has a wife, Eve (played by Phoenix-based actress Jennifer Pfalzgraff), and daughter, Mallory (Christina Rose, whose musical, How Do You Write a Joe Schermann Song, won the audience award at the 2012 Phoenix Film Festival). There also is Andromeda, a mysterious woman from Tim’s past, who is played by Krista Allen (The L.A. Complex, Baywatch Hawaii and Liar Liar).

Though it’s billed as sic-fi comedy, Baker thinks Eleven Eleven is more a family story.

“The sic-fi seems kind of ancillary,” he says. “That’s just a foil. The comedy and the heart that the story have are so much more.”

Tim is “everything that I wanted to play,” Baker says. “I wanted to play a father. I wanted to play a family man. I wanted to play a noble character with a noble purpose. And a flawed character at the same time.”

He says that accepting the role was a leap of faith because he didn’t know the people involved in the project. When he researched Redish via the Internet and social media, he found only good feedback on the director.

“It seemed like he was a guy I could take a chance on,” Baker says, adding that it took only two days on set for him to know he’d made the right decision. “You kind of have a lower expectation when you hear ‘indie film’ and ‘low-budget.’ I was amazed at the professionalism, the dedication and the pure passion the entire crew has for this project.”

Independent films also offer cast and crew more opportunities for collaboration, he says. For instance, “The Art Department gets to really make the decisions about the art, about the set design and the set decoration — because, a lot of times, nobody has the time to oversee it. Everybody gets to be their own artist.”

Meanwhile, Baker can focus on his work with actresses Allen and Rose.

“They have lead roles under their belts,” he notes. “They’re the ones forcing me to play my ‘A’ game. Everything I know about doing this job is being tested. Because I don’t want to let them down.”

The Blacklist

In addition to Breaking Bad, Baker got a lot of air time this fall in promotions for The Blacklist, a new NBC drama featuring Emmy-winning actor James Spader. Baker is the guy who carried Spader’s briefcase in the opening scene.

“I had the very first line in the pilot,” Baker says. “I was really proud of that. It was another one of those, ‘Wow, I get to not be a drug addict. I get to wear a suit and have my hair slicked back.’”

But the character wasn’t slick enough. He met his end in the Jan. 13 episode after double-crossing his boss, Spader’s Raymond “Red” Reddington. Hey, if you’ve got to go, that’s a pretty dramatic way to die.

Man on the Move

But fans won’t have to wait long to see Baker again. He spent much of 2013 on location. In addition to Eleven Eleven, he did two other feature films.

In Oregon, he did a movie called Wild, which stars Reese Witherspoon and is directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyer’s Club).

After that, he says, “I went and worked with Michael Pitt [Boardwalk Empire, The Dreamers] in Oklahoma on a movie called You Can’t Win, which is set in the ’20s.”

Meanwhile, Redish says Eleven Eleven should arrive at film festivals early in 2015.

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Stuart J. Robinson practices writing, editing, media relations and social media through his business, Phoenix-based Lightbulb Communications.

 

 

 

Tags: Breaking Bad, Charles Baker, Chris Redish, Christina Rose, Eleven Eleven, Jennifer Pfalzgraff, Krista Allen