Finding a singular soul in the everyman
The actor revels in playing complicated characters
NEW YORK - It could be easy to dismiss Patrick Wilson as another of Hollywood's pretty young things. The 35-year-old is your prototypical heartthrob with bulging biceps, a heart-melting smile, and a jaw line that could cut glass. But we've seen these types flame out before. For every Brad Pitt or Jude Law success story, there's a James Marsden or Josh Hartnett, wannabe stars long past their sell-by date.
Still, with proven acting chops and willingness to take chances, it's doubtful that Wilson will crash and burn anytime soon. His face will be splashed across the big screen in no less than three films in the coming year, including the neighbor-from-hell thriller "Lakeview Terrace," opening Friday, and the plane-crash mind-twister "Passengers," which premieres next month co-starring Anne Hathaway. Most anticipated of all is the adaptation of the hallowed graphic novel "Watchmen," revered by comic aficionados the world over and due in theaters in March.
Chatting with Wilson during a recent lunch in the West Village, he evinces a smart, relatable, and reflective mien while shifting through a range of subjects, from Major League baseball, to his formative years as an actor, to his return to the Broadway stage in the revival of "All My Sons."
Wilson has carved out something of a niche playing man-boy characters clinging to the exhilaration and freedom of their fading youth and grappling with varying degrees of arrested development.
In the Oscar-nominated "Little Children," he played a stay-at-home dad who eschews studying for the bar exam to pursue an afternoon-delight extramarital affair and secretly relive his glory days in a nighttime touch-football league. In the acclaimed HBO miniseries of "Angels in America," the actor played another Lost Boy - a closeted Mormon grappling with a depressed, pill-popping wife and the inner demons of his repressed sexuality. And in "Watchmen," a film that will surely raise the actor's profile (barring any delay due to a contentious lawsuit between Warner Brothers and Fox), Wilson portrays Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl II, a sexually impotent, geeked-out gadget obsessive who only feels like a man when he has his suit on and he's out fighting crime.
These are not easy roles to play. They could come off as generic everymen, but Wilson doesn't play them as ciphers - adding texture and giving audiences a sense of the characters' interior lives.
"I've seen a lot of actors who work very hard, and then you see it on screen, and it looks easy," says Wilson. "The hardest thing to play is a character who is lost. It's much easier to say, 'I'm going to run across the street.' There, you know what you're doing. But trying to play somebody that doesn't even know where to run but wants to run, that's very difficult."
In "Lakeview Terrace," a thriller directed by that chronicler of pent-up male aggression Neil LaBute, Wilson plays Prius-driving suburbanite Chris, who moves into a new neighborhood with his African-American wife, Lisa (Kerry Washington). The couple soon find themselves in a dangerous, no-holds-barred battle of wills with their black neighbor, Abel (Samuel L. Jackson), an LAPD officer with two young children who disapproves of Chris and Lisa's interracial union. While it's clear that Chris loves his wife deeply, he resists her repeated desire to start a family. And when Abel ups the ante in their escalating war, Chris seeks to prove his manhood in the face of Abel's reckless behavior.
"I like people that are a little flawed," says Wilson. "Chris is a good guy. But he loses it and is not always the most responsible. He tells little lies to his wife, and he's still trying to figure out who he is. I like characters who have some sort of darkness or something they're trying to overcome."
Having never shied away from shining a light on the ugliest aspects of human nature in films like "Your Friends and Neighbors" and "In the Company of Men," LaBute was looking for an actor who could capture the character's journey from boy to man - his fear of parenthood and adult responsibilities juxtaposed with his efforts to protect his homestead at all costs.
"Patrick is not trading on his good looks. He has them. They're his. They're there to use as a tool or not," LaBute says. "I think he's akin to someone like Aaron Eckhart, who I've worked with a lot. At their heart, they love to disappear into characters and create believable emotional lives and believable behavior."
In "Watchmen," Wilson's character also struggles with finding his place in the world and reconciling his eroded sense of manhood. As an overweight and sexually impotent misfit, Nite Owl is another of Wilson's Lost Boys. The film, directed by Zach Snyder of "300," eschewed A-list stars for a slew of Hollywood's most intriguing character actors, including Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Matthew Goode.
"['Watchmen' author] Alan Moore sort of likens [my character] to a guy coming back from the war and feeling lost. He doesn't really fit into society," says Wilson, who gained some 20 pounds for the role. "It's one of the most complex characters I've ever played. I certainly didn't feel like, 'Hey, I'm doing a superhero movie. I can just relax and be cool in a suit.
Growing up in Tampa/St. Petersburg (his dad is a local TV news anchor), Wilson was a three-sport athlete. At prep school, arts were low in the hierarchy. But when Wilson was 16, he attended Boston University's Summer Theatre Institute with a friend and was bitten by the acting bug. "It was the first time I was around a bunch of kids who had the same drive that I did," he says. "It's where I decided to become an actor."
When he returned to school that fall, he quit the football and baseball teams in order to concentrate on theater (he was still able to juggle playing soccer).
Wilson worked for nearly a decade in the city's theater scene, eventually landing major roles in the original Broadway production of "The Full Monty" and the 2002 revival of "Oklahoma!," which earned him Tony award nominations for best actor in a musical.
During that time, he auditioned for dozens of film and TV parts with little success. His breakthrough came when Mike Nichols cast him in the 2004 TV adaptation of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," for which he scored Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. And while Wilson has been focused on his budding film and TV career of late, he hasn't forsaken the theater.
In "All My Sons," which co-stars John Lithgow, Dianne Weist, and Katie Holmes in her Broadway debut, Wilson plays a man whose world is shattered when he discovers the truth about his father's culpability in a crime. Director Simon McBurney praises Wilson for his charisma, instinct for ferreting out the truth, and ability to find that primal beast lurking inside.
"What is really surprising to me has been the depth of Patrick's aggression and power," says McBurney. "The scene with his father at the end of Act II is incendiary. It's like what you'd expect from Brando in 'On the Waterfront.' "
For Wilson, it's a matter of seeking out roles in which he can explore uncharted artistic territory. "I try to push it as far as I can," Wilson says. "I look for dynamic characters with a real arc or who change in some way. I just hope to be as variegated an actor as I'm allowed." 