*A note to the fellas out there: We women dig men who dig the theater, which may explain why we love Broadway veteran Patrick Wilson so much. (His turn as the handsome hero in the 2004 movie version of The Phantom of the Opera certainly didn’t hurt either.) Soon, you’ll have two reasons of your own to love him: this month’s Lakeview Terrace and the highly anticipated Watchmen movie, coming in 2009. With any luck, you’ll be so enraptured by him that you’ll hardly even wince when we buy tickets to his new play.
[dl] Big Screen
Bright Lights, Two Cities
New York or L.A.? Stage or screen? Multitalented actor Patrick Wilson’s heart lies somewhere in between. By Joseph Guinto
You know the robber whobrandishes a shotgun and storms into the McDowell’s (not McDonald’s) restaurant in Coming to America? The guy Eddie Murphy beats up using a mop handle turned quarterstaff? Remember?
Well, that’s Samuel L. Jackson.
You know who knew that? Patrick Wilson.
This month, Wilson costars with the very same, but now much more famous, Samuel L. Jackson in the psychological thriller Lakeview Terrace. While they were on set together, Wilson discovered he wasn’t the only one who remembered that Arsenio Hall got better billing than Jackson in the 1988 hit film.
“Neil LaBute, the director of Lakeview, and I tried to play a trivia game with Sam about his own movies,” Wilson says. “We thought he’d been in so many movies that he’d never remember them all. But he actually stumped us. He hasn’t forgotten anything.”
It may come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed Wilson’s career that the Broadway veteran is also a well-learned student of cinema. In his 14 years of acting, the 35-year-old Tony-nominated actor has been known primarily for his roles in major stage productions like Carousel and Oklahoma!
But when he decided to take the leap to film acting, he eased the transition by choosing roles that had been adapted from Broadway productions. First, he played Joe Pitt on HBO’s critically acclaimed series Angels in America, based on the Tony Kushner play; following that, he starred as Raoul in the 2004 film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera.
“I never really wanted to give up these great roles I was getting in theater just to go out to L.A. and do film or TV shows,” says Wilson. “The reason I started doing film was because Mike Nichols gave me a shot with Angels in America.”
Then came small-budget indie hits Hard Candy (costarring Juno’s Ellen Page) and Little Children (with Kate Winslet), the latter of which earned him critical praise as an adulterous husband.
This month, in Lakeview Terrace, Wilson plays one half of an interracial couple (Kerry Washington plays his wife) whom the cop living next door (Jackson) wants out of his suburban California neighborhood. Wilson also recently finished work on an independent comedy called Barry Munday, in which he plays the title character. And next year, he’s due to share the screen with Billy Crudup and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in Watchmen, a big-budget DC Comics production.
Though it’s not all CGI explosions and billion-dollar price tags for the Virginia native these days, he’s not exactly keeping a low profile. As Lakeview hits theaters, he’ll be busy onstage in New York, doing Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. The play is sure to attract a great deal of attention; it costars Katie Holmes.
His mixed workload keeps him bicoastal -- and sometimes away from his Brooklyn-based wife, stage actress Dagmara Dominczyk, and their two-year-old son, Kal -- but he’s grateful for the chance to do both film and theater, especially given the intensity of a Broadway schedule.
“The time commitment to theater is more involved and takes a lot more planning,” he says. “For theater, you have to say, ‘Okay, don’t send me any scripts or auditions or meetings for the next six months because I’m going to do a play until the end of the year.’
“Theater is the greatest experience for an actor, I think. But I love movies, too,” he adds. “Getting to do both is a pretty nice position to be in.”
GETTING TO KNOW … PATRICK WILSON
He’s a Wilson of the Appalachian Wilsons:
“My dad’s side of the family is originally from Vickstown Gap in Appalachia,” Patrick Wilson says. “To get there, you cross the Wilson Bridge and turn down Wilson Road, and you’ll find a lot of Wilsons.”
The part that got away:
“I wish Tony hadn’t passed me by in West Side Story,” Wilson says. “I’m a little long in the tooth for that now. And unfortunately, I don’t think I could have played it at 20 either.”
He could have been an anchorman:
Wilson must have taken after his mother’s side. His mom, Mary, has worked as a voice teacher. His father, John, is a longtime TV anchor at WTVT in Tampa, Florida. Mark Wilson, one of his two elder brothers, is also an anchor at the same station.
The force is with his son. Twice:
“I’m a huge, huge, huge Star Wars fan,” Wilson says. “My son, Kal, doesn’t know Star Wars yet. But he will. “My business manager gave me a Darth Vader mask signed by James Earl Jones. It says, ‘To Kal: May the Force be with you.’ Well, I’m telling that to Kerry Washington on set one day, and I guess Sam Jackson overhears us. The next day, Sam comes in with a Mace Windu doll, and it says, ‘To Kal, May the Force be with you.’ And he says to me, ‘Well, since your son has one Jedi, he’s got to have another.’ That’s the kind of guy Sam is.”