Dylan Baker

Dylan Baker is an American actor born on October 7, 1959, in Syracuse, New York, who was raised in Lynchburg, Virginia. He attended Holy Cross Regional Catholic School and Darlington School before graduating from Georgetown Preparatory School in 1976. Baker went on to study at the College of William and Mary and later earned a bachelor's degree from Southern Methodist University in 1980, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama, where his classmates included Chris Noth and Patricia Clarkson. He began performing as a teenager in regional theater productions.

Baker's stage career preceded his work in film and television. He won an Obie Award in 1986 for his off-Broadway performance in Not About Heroes, and in 1989 he received a Theatre World Award for his Broadway work. His Broadway credits span from 1989 to 2018 and include Eastern Standard, La Bête, Mauritius, November, and God of Carnage. His role in the original 1991 production of La Bête earned him both a Tony Award nomination and a Drama Desk Award nomination. In 2015, he appeared alongside Helen Mirren in The Audience, portraying former British Prime Minister John Major in a play depicting Queen Elizabeth II's meetings with historical figures, which opened on March 8 of that year.

Baker made his film debut in Planes, Trains and Automobiles in 1987. He drew significant critical attention with his portrayal of a tormented pedophile in Todd Solondz's Happiness in 1998. In 2000, he played Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in Thirteen Days, a drama centered on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Subsequent film roles included Alexander Rance, an accountant for the Chicago Outfit, in Road to Perdition (2002), and Dr. Curt Connors in both Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007). He also appeared in Revolutionary Road (2008), Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013), and Selma (2014). Baker made his directorial debut with the 2013 film 23 Blast.

On television, Baker's first recurring role came in Steven Bochco's Murder One from 1995 to 1996. He subsequently appeared in series including Northern Exposure, Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, The West Wing, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, among others. He played recurring roles in Damages in 2011, portraying Pashto-speaking CIA agent Jerry Boorman in season four, and in The Americans in 2016, where he appeared as deep-cover KGB agent William Crandall, a biological weapons expert, in season four. In 2018, he joined the cast of Homeland's seventh season as Senator Sam Paley. His most sustained television role was as Colin Sweeney on The Good Wife, a part he held from 2010 to 2015 that earned him three Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series, in 2010, 2012, and 2014.

Beyond acting, Baker is an extensive narrator of audiobooks, having recorded works ranging from fiction such as The Grapes of Wrath and The Corrections to biographies including Steve Jobs. He received the 2002 Audie Award for Abridged Fiction for his narration of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and later recorded Franzen's 2015 novel Purity. Baker married actress Becky Ann Baker in 1990, and the couple have a daughter and reside in New York City.