Joe Don Baker: Walk Tall & Carry a Big Stick

Joe Don Baker had one of the best “sneaky good” careers as a character actor, with a resume that touched on seven decades. Standing six feet two (although seemingly larger), Baker was one of his era’s great “good ‘ol boy” actors. He had that “country strong” look about him. Baker had that “soft around the middle” look, but hands that looked like bear claws that looked like they could break cinder blocks in two without a weapon. And then there was that thick Texas drawl that set him up for a life in Hollywood as the tough guy who would bend the rules if he were playing a character on the right side of the law, and thrash any standards all to hell should his role put him on the opposite side of the justice system.

Baker paid his dues early on as an actor, appearing in guest spots on TV Westerns and bit roles on film (Baker had an uncredited part as “Fixer” in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke). His first sizable role came in 1971’s The Wild Rovers, a commercially unsuccessful Western directed by Blake Edwards that nonetheless found him in the company of William Holden, Ryan O’Neal, and Karl Malden. The Wild Rovers may not have made money or earned strong critical notices, but it put Baker on the map. 

The following year would find Baker playing Curly Bonner, the brother of Steve McQueen’s Junior in Sam Peckinpah’s rodeo drama, Junior Bonner. Easily Peckinpah’s warmest and most sentimental film. The picture was not well-received by critics or moviegoers at the time, but has gone on to earn a kinder reassessment as the rare movie that delved deeply into a lifestyle seldom covered with such precision on film. 

One year later, Baker would briefly become a major star in the exploitation thriller Walking Tall, which told the true-life story of Buford Pusser, a man who took the law into his own hands after taking a severe beating after catching the local casino/flophouse cheating at craps. A former professional wrestler, Pusser goes into the logging business at his wife’s behest. When he turns to the town sheriff after his assault and finds no justice, Pusser fashions a club out of a tree branch, which he then applies to the heads and torsos of those who wronged him. While the story of Pusser may sound ridiculous, it is based on real-life events. Walking Tall was made for half a million dollars, but became a massive hit, grossing $40,000 (nearly $300,000,00 in 2025 dollars when adjusted for inflation). Interestingly, Baker turned down the chance to make a sequel and moved on from his life’s most prominent starring role. Three decades later, Walking Tall would be remade with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the lead. 

Along with Walking Tall, Baker also had strong supporting roles in the well-received crime thrillers Charley Varrick (with Walter Matthau) and The Outfit (with Robert Duvall). 1973 would prove to be the most significant year in Baker’s career, but the next decade would prove lean despite having established himself as a powerful on-screen presence. 

Not until Barry Levinson’s beloved 1984 baseball drama The Natural (starring Robert Redford) would Baker again be seen in a memorable project. As “The Whammer,” Baker played a feared hitter, obviously modeled on Babe Ruth. While Baker’s role may not have been the biggest in the film, he fit the towering bill perfectly. Well enough that one could easily fantasize about Baker playing Ruth in a biopic based on the legendary Yankee great. 

Baker would follow up The Natural in 1985 with plum roles in the Chevy Chase hit comedy Fletch (playing a corrupt judge) and as a CIA agent in the BBC production Edge of Darkness. The latter project supplied Baker with the best and most lauded role of his career. Baker’s agent Darius Jedburgh fit perfectly with Baker’s persona, but also made excellent use of his wry sense of humor and gave Baker his most colorful character. Seldom, if ever, had Baker been given so many colors to play, and he filled in the eccentricities of his character with aplomb. Baker was rarely an actor who was considered for awards, but the BAFTAs recognized his excellence in Edge of Darkness by nominating him for Best Actor in a Drama Series.

When Timothy Dalton was cast as James Bond in The Living Daylights (1987), Baker could be found in support as a villainous arms dealer involved with the Russians. The film was well-reviewed, highly successful, and further burnished Baker’s bona fides as a charismatic tough guy. 

The remainder of Baker’s years on-screen were spent in projects that often asked little more from him than to provide the “Joe Don Baker” persona, but there were notable exceptions down the stretch run of his acting life. One of the most prominent would be his turn as a private investigator named Claude Kersek in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear hired by Atlanta attorney Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) to track Max Cady (Robert De Niro), a psychotic rapist who terrorizes Bowden’s family over Bowden’s suppressing of evidence that might have resulted in a lighter sentence for Cady fourteen years earlier. While the film belongs to Juliette Lewis and her stunning portrayal of a teen on the dangerous edge of discovering her budding sexuality, Baker all but steals every scene he’s in, despite playing across from cinematic legends De Niro, Nolte, and Jessica Lange (as Bowden’s wife). Arguably, the film’s second-best scene occurs when Kersek explains to Sam Bowden that he should be “scared.” It’s a brief monologue that works on multiple levels: as a statement on the South’s history of racism, and just how much trouble Bowden has landed in. As Kersek states:

“No, you’re scared. But that’s okay. I want you to savor that fear. The South evolved in fear; fear of the Indian, fear of the slave, fear of the damn Union. The South has a fine tradition of savoring fear.”

Kersek makes it clear to Bowden that he has become a part of that tradition.

While Baker never scored another role as meaningful as Claude Kersak, he did make strong impressions in the HBO film Citizen Cohn playing Joseph McCarthy, a small part in the cult classic Reality Bites, the deeply underrated Steven Soderbergh noir The Underneath, he returned to the Bond series playing a different character (Jack Wade) in two Pierce Brosnan entries GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies), and the multi-Emmy-nominated TV film George Wallace.

Baker capped his career with the brilliant Jeff Nichols film Mud in 2012. As “King,” the vengeance-seeking father after a man (Mud, played by Matthew McConaughey) who caused his son’s death, Baker, even at the age of 76, is completely convincing as a bitter, driven, and formidable man. Again, Baker seldom received notice from those who hand out awards, but with Mud, Baker (along with his fellow cast members)  won the Robert Altman Independent Spirit Award for Best Ensemble.

This may be a strange way to end a tribute, but I must include the Joe Don Baker joke Chris Rock made when covering the 1996 Republican National Convention (RNC) for Politically Incorrect. When asked by host Bill Maher to describe the scene on the floor at the RNC, Rock replied, “It’s white! It’s so white Joe Don Baker could open a movie up in here!”

I’m not sure how many people watching at home understood such a deep cut cinematic joke, but I howled my ass off. Rock understood the Joe Don Baker persona, and the joke works not because there’s anything wrong with Joe Don Baker, but because of how Joe Don Baker’s career as an actor can easily (too easily) be summarized: as a big white good ol’ boy who could make a deadly weapon from a stick and beat the hell out of you while delivering his lines with that deep southwestern drawl.

That’s what makes the words Baker speaks in Cape Fear so impactful. Joe Don Baker was more than what he seemed to be, Chris Rock’s joke be damned. 

Joe Don Baker died on May 7, 2025. He was 89 years old.