Good Man: A Profile of Patrick Wilson
Interrogating the screen presence of the lately minted scream king
A version of this piece, edited beyond recognition, will run in the Spring 2021 issue of MovieMaker Magazine under the title “Patrick Wilson Acts Like a Director.” For my debut post on this blog, I’ve decided to run my version here.
It is a new year, and that means there must be a new Conjuring movie. The release of The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It was slated for September 2020, but as with so much in the COVID era, it was pushed back. It’s hard to think of a horror movie that generated more anticipation over the 80 months since the pandemic began. But one doesn’t easily match the energy that this franchise built up as it barreled like a runaway train through the past decade, ignited by a six-studio bidding war that resulted in eight films grouped into roughly three mini franchises, made over nine years by six directors, racking up at least 10 screenwriters and story credits, between 20 and 25 original characters, two lawsuits, and a nearly $2 billion accumulated global gross against a combined $140 million budget. What’s more: The Conjuring movies are very, very good.
A horror franchise as beloved and as enduringly successful as The Conjuring isn’t so rare in modern times—think of the nine film Saw series, or soon-to-be five film Insidious series. But that it is the same team behind all of these entities is something remarkable. Across nearly 25 films spanning 17 years, this energetic, tight-knit cluster of filmmakers have done more than just revolutionize the way horror looks in the 21st century. Behind the scenes, their unmatched string of creatively uncompromised commercial juggernauts have changed the way that studios treat their properties based on original IP. They are: director, producer, and head concept man James Wan, some time actor, long time writer, and rising director Leigh Whannell, and the star of the hour, Patrick Wilson.
Patrick Wilson, star of Insidious 1 and 2, co-star of The Conjuring 1, 2, and 3 with Vera Farmiga, soon to be director of Insidious 5, singing and dancing veteran of Broadway, father of two with his wife, the actress Dagmara Domińczyk, and frequent subject of “that guy—I love that guy!” social media posts is getting re-acquainted with the world, just like the rest of us. “How am I doing …” he repeats back when I ask him. “Man … I’m just trying to manage. My wife and I are trying to manage a household, trying to manage schooling for our kids, and we’re both trying to manage, you know, careers.” Wilson and I caught up a few months before the release of The Conjuring 3, over two years since production commenced. “COVID took so many things away from so many of us,” he reflects, his voice shimmering with the unspoken gratitude that from his family, it didn’t take too much. Even over the phone, Wilson exudes the kind of confident yet humble, chivalrous warmth that his best characters are loved for.
From the moment he arrived in Hollywood, Patrick Wilson has been seen as inherently good. I’ve seen almost all the Conjuring films and their spinoffs in theaters with the same friend, and whenever we exit the theater she invariably says something like, “God, he is just a good man.” What’s interesting about Wilson’s career, and what perhaps separated him from the pack of rabid leading men with gleaming teeth, perfect coifs and spotless trousers who are snapping every day at the gates of Central Casting, has been his willingness to play against this type, and his inability to ever fully escape it. Whether it’s the aggravatingly perfect foil to Charlize Theron’s narcissistic mess in Young Adult, or the broken pedophile who hides behind a disarming guy-next-door mask in Hard Candy, Patrick Wilson has come to embody a kind of gallant but not showy, sensitive but not soft, decent American masculinity. The kind of “lost” masculinity anchors on reactionary news programs get paid to cry over. His character in The Conjuring movies, based on legendary real life demonologist and paranormal investigator Ed Warren, continues to electrify audiences, because it is the apotheosis of a screen persona twenty years in the making.
Patrick Wilson was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1973, but grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida, just across the bay from Tampa. The youngest of three sons, Wilson spent his youth and childhood “sort of, somewhat, kind of tangential to the movie business.” His father, John Wilson, was a popular news anchor for many years on Tampa Bay WTVT, and his mother, Mary Kay, was a professional singer and voice teacher. The Wilson boys happily accepted their share of genetic hand me downs and followed in their parents footsteps. Older brother Mark now anchors on FOX 13 Tampa Bay, and when Patrick came of age, he shipped off to Carnegie Mellon to study drama.
Straight out of school Wilson was cast in back to back touring stage productions, as the understudy to the male lead in Miss Saigon (1995), and as the carnival barker Billy Bigelow in Carousel (1996). He finally arrived on Broadway “at the tail end of the 90s jukebox musical” craze—Mamma Mia, Saturday Night Fever, that kind of thing. Though his strapping good looks, sublime tenor vocal range, and engaged, collaborative nature had won the adoration of audiences and the attention of theater power-brokers alike on the road, he had to suffer a few flops before he found his footing.
“If you read any of the reviews of work I did in my twenties,” he recalls, “critics were for the most part nice, but to them I was ‘Convincing!’ ‘Underplayed!’ ‘Natural!’ For so long I didn't gravitate toward those real, magnetic, consuming roles. I'd watch guys like Nathan Lane,” or his hometown hero Terrence Mann, “who could hold an entire audience from the stage, and just be amazed.” It would take a new medium, a new genre, and 15 years to throw that early career timidity into perspective: “I've really come full circle—I love embracing the melodrama. There’s actually something very theatrical about these horror movies. It’s the same heightened kind of acting.”
After ping ponging from from failed musical to failed play in the late ‘90s, from Sweet Bird of Youth in La Jolla to Bright Lights, Big City off Broadway, Wilson found his breakout role in 2000 as Jerry in the original cast of The Full Monty. That performance garnered him a set of Drama Desk and Tony nominations (a second and final set would come two years later, for Oklahoma!). Wilson’s plan for the first year of the new millennium was to not just crossover from off to on Broadway, but also from stage to screen. Wilson completed a small role in My Sister’s Wedding, a “strange, run-and-gun movie,” that he “doesn’t even know what it was shot on, it wasn’t film. Beta or something? It was really a blip.” in 2000. Release was slated for the following year, but release never came.
Wilson went back to Broadway unperturbed, killing it in the aforementioned Oklahoma! as the charming, cocksure, bronco buster Curly McLain. When a second screen opportunity came to him, it came in hot. Wilson was offered below the title billing as Joe Pitt in Mike Nichols’ made for HBO adaptation of Angels in America. Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer winning “gay fantasia” of AIDS, alienation, and American hypocrisybecame a cultural sensation when it premiered in San Francisco in 1991, fundamentally remaking the way the country remembered itself under Reagan. With a director like Mike Nichols, costars like Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, and Emma Thompson, and built in distribution to 10s of millions of viewers, Angels had Patrick Wilson poised to springboard fully formed into Hollywood.
“Because of Angels in America," he surmises, “and the award nominations and the buzz that that show got that I then became a recipient of, I walked into Hollywood—at 30 mind you! I wasn’t 22, I wasn’t a total kid, I’d been on Broadway. But by that being my calling card, by Joe Pitt being my audition tape for Hollywood, it automatically put me in a certain position.” Joe is a kind, mild mannered Mormon, dutiful husband, and deeply closeted lawyer who’s pushed into homophobic litigation by Al Pacino’s wicked Roy Cohn. It’s by no means the most scene stealing role in the play, but Wilson’s heartfelt and nuanced rendition rivaled anything put forth by his more senior castmates. “People thought, if he can hold his own opposite Meryl Streep and Al Pacino, then let’s offer him Hard Candy, let’s offer him Phantom of the Opera. Basically they thought, okay. He is an actor.”
And what kind of actor did they think he was? Through the prism of the particulars of the Joe Pitt character, Patrick Wilson’s profile as an actor cleaved, beaming in two distinct yet parallel directions. The result was a triangulated acumen, a type that Wilson has been playing to, against, or in spite of his entire film career. Pitt wasn’t the first complicated “good guy” that Wilson played, in other words. But he, and the two roles that followed, went a long way toward ensuring it wouldn’t be the last.
Excluding a part in John Lee Hancock’s historical epic The Alamo immediately following Angels, Wilson’s next two roles were Raoul, the honorable yet cucked tenor in Joel Schumacher’s Phantom of the Opera, and the pedophile Jeff Kohlver in David Slade’s Hard Candy, to date Wilson’s darkest performance. When he recalls the experience of embodying a man who uses his good looks and non-threatening demeanor to attempt assault on a 14 year old Elliot Page, his tone still clouds over. “I’m attracted to roles that scare me. But those were just tough days on the soul.”
Joe, Raoul, and Jeff are a closeted Republican lawyer for the U.S. Court of Appeals, an operatic 19th century Viscount, and slimy suburban pervert. They don’t have much in common outside of one thing. In each film, Wilson’s characters are presented to the audience through lighting, costume, and framing decisions, as well as in small personal gestures and initial dialogue, as kind, upstanding, gentlemanly, honorable men. And in each case that perception is manipulated, complicated, or outright subverted. Joe’s goodness winds up being the cross of strait-laced American masculinity that he must bear; Raoul’s goodness wins out in the end, but for 90% of Phantom, it is taken for weakness by both his rival and his lover; and for Jeff, goodness is wielded cynically toward corrupted ends. This is what makes Wilson’s screen presence so thrilling. There are two levels that are constantly interacting—the character you see on screen, and the essence you sense behind it, in existential conflict with it.
How interesting it is that this man, this very decent man, now finds himself seated close to the head of one of the darkest, most demonic tables in the industry.
“Scream king” is now a term that follows Wilson around. Outside of Insidious and The Conjuring, over the past ten years he’s appeared in Bone Tomahawk, Nightmare Cinema, A Kind of Murder, the horror comedy Home Sweet Hell, and the Stephen King adaptation In The Tall Grass, to name a few. “I’ve gotta be honest,” he says. “I don’t actually watch a lot of horror movies. I see it, I respect it, I just don’t often respond to it.” “I’m a theater guy,” he laughs. For the first decade of his career he was regularly getting horror scripts, but nothing stuck out. “There was always a lot of money in them,” he says, but nothing “like Poltergeist or like Silence of the Lambs, films that really transcend the genre.” If it came down to shooting a movie just to shoot a movie or spending two months with his family, Wilson chose his family every time.
Meeting James Wan at the turn of the decade would change all that. Over the course of the 2010s, Wan, Wilson, and Whannell would go on to transform horror in much the same way that Wan and Whannell transformed the 2000s with Saw. But with Insidious, and even moreso with The Conjuring, the change ran in the opposite direction, away from high-concept splatter-gore and toward warm, lived-in locations, classic narrative design, and sophisticated, character-driven scares. In horror, Patrick Wilson has found an extremely potent arrangement to suit his strengths. Where once a deeply embedded darkness or duplicity teased viewers from behind a mask of unimpeachable goodness, now that darkness is rendered external, enveloping Wilson, raising that which radiates strongest within him high above the scrum so that it is unmissable. Surrounded by so much darkness, Wilson shines like a beacon of salvation.
“With The Conjuring it’s built into the very structure of the film,” he explains. “You know going in that Ed and Lorraine are going to be surrounded by negativity and evil, so we get to go the complete opposite and play these larger than life personifications of love.” The Conjuring films each center on a real case in the career of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, famed for their work on the Amityville horror. Where the first two, both directed by Wan, took the shape of haunted house/possession films culminating in a climactic exorcism, The Devil Made Me Do It begins with an exorcism gone horribly wrong that explodes outward, imperiling the lives of everyone present, especially Ed and Lorraine.
The third Conjuring film also represents a seismic staffing shift for the franchise—Wan announced in late 2019 that he’d pass the directing reigns on to Michael Chaves, who directed the thrilling, loosely in-universe spinoff The Curse of La Llorona that same year. Chaves raved about Wilson when I spoke to him on the day of his Conjuring’s first test screenings: “He is the most generous actor. When you’re shooting he’ll always say ‘Okay, let me give you another one a little bigger, another a little quieter.’ A lot of times when actors ask for other takes it’s because they’re unhappy with their performance. But when Patrick does it it’s because he’s giving you options. He acts like a director.”
With Insidious 5 around the corner … after Aquaman 2 (another Waniverse moment), a part in Roland Emmerich’s new film Midway, and several music projects … Wilson will get the chance to test those instincts. But he’s ready for the challenge: "I know this franchise so well, I love James, I love Leigh, I’ve done several movies with Blumhouse, and I know I’ll be so protected. Stepping up to direct is, forgive the pun, a little scary to me, and I do have a bit to wait. But it’s okay. Time is on my side.”