Bobbi Baker ’01 knew at least one thing when she arrived at Western as a student. “I had never done a play before, but I knew that I wanted to be onstage,” recalled Baker, 27, who majored in theater. Now a member of the cast of a successful television comedy, a character in the debut of the stage adaptation of a bestselling author’s first novel and an actor in a popular film series, Baker has found success in the career for which Western helped her prepare.
“What Bobbi came with to Western was a desire to be very good,” said Stephen Michael Ayers, a recently retired professor in Western’s department of stage and screen. “You can’t teach talent,and Bobbi was dynamite when she got here. She was intelligent and articulate and gifted and polite and funny, and I thought, ‘Here’s an engaging young woman who has the discipline for this business.’” Ayers cast and directed Baker in university productions including “Romeo and Juliet,” “Don’t Dress for Dinner,” “A Few Good Men” and “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.”
That foundation helped prepare her for an acting career, said Baker, a native of Raleigh. “There’s no training like being onstage,” she said. “The greatest gift that Western gave me was the opportunity to be onstage almost year-round.”
Baker has been onstage nearly nonstop since leaving Western. After graduation, she spent four years studying drama at the Juilliard School, using the time to concentrate fully on her craft. She graduated in spring 2007, and by October had secured the part of Claudia in the stage adaptation of Toni Morrison’s first novel, “The Bluest Eye.”
As that job, a co-production of the Hartford Stage Company and the Long Wharf Theatre, was about to begin in January in Connecticut, Baker submitted an audition tape for the TBS show “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne.” “Usually when you submit something for a job out-of-state, it can take weeks to hear back,” Baker said. “They contacted me the next day, and I had to be in Atlanta the next week.”
Baker played the recurring character of Kiki, a female barbershop employee, on the show’s third season. The character, a slick-talking Northerner, was a challenge for Baker. “Kiki’s a pistol,” Baker said. “People don’t see me as tough. I decided to dig deep and find this character. When we started shooting, she just started to emerge.”
When the “House of Payne” season wrapped at the end of January, Baker flew from Atlanta to New Jersey, where she makes her home, packed her bags, and left for Connecticut the next day.
Baker earned a solid review for her part in “The Bluest Eye,” with The New York Times writing, “Bobbi Baker is just terrific as Claudia, easily conveying both her adult perspective on the events of her girlhood and the child’s more limited understanding of them.” That production wrapped at the end of April.
Since then, Baker has been asked to join “House of Payne” for additional seasons, and was cast in the part of an assistant district attorney in an upcoming film, “Madea Goes to Jail,” the latest in a series of Tyler Perry’s successful “Madea” pictures. “It’s been sort of a ‘work begets work’ type experience for me,” Baker said.
The schedule becomes more impressive considering Baker is a newlywed. In August 2007, she married Nate James, a former forward on the Duke University basketball team. James, a team captain when Duke won the 2001 NCAA championship, is now an assistant coach at the school.
Baker’s goal is to be “well-rounded in all of the entertainment mediums of acting,” she said. Ayers believes Baker has the potential. “The possibilities for her are endless,” he said. “She’s extraordinarily gifted. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her gravitate toward theater because she loves the live reaction. If I had to guess, she will be an enormously successful Broadway actress.”