Patrick Wilson
Patrick Wilson is an actor, born 1973.
Patrick Wilson began on Broadway in 1995 and has three Tony nominations to show for it, two for performing in The Full Monty and Oklahoma!, and one as a producer of The Lost Boys. His screen breakthrough was the HBO miniseries Angels in America in 2003, which brought Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy nominations and set the pattern: a clean cut leading man face, used by good directors to make you uneasy.
Hard Candy and Little Children both cast him as a handsome, reasonable man you should not trust, and that early stretch is the most interesting acting in his filmography. What he does that few of his contemporaries can is play sincerity with no protective irony, which turns out to be a rare and valuable skill in genre film.
That skill is the entire reason the Conjuring films work. Ed Warren is a role that would collapse instantly if the actor signalled any distance from the material, and Wilson plays a man of total belief with total conviction across four films plus the surrounding spinoffs. He anchors the Insidious series in the same way, and directed the fifth entry himself.
The rest is a broad blockbuster shelf, some of it excellent, some of it Moonfall. He plays Orm in the Aquaman films with a straight faced operatic grandeur that the material does not always deserve, and his single best television performance remains Lou Solverson in the second season of Fargo.
Movies (49)
- The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025)
- The Conjuring (2013)
- Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)
- The Conjuring 2 (2016)
- Insidious: The Red Door (2023)
- Insidious: The Red Door (2023)
- Aquaman (2018)
- The Nun (2018)
- The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)
- Insidious (2011)
- Prometheus (2012)
- Midway (2019)
- The Nun II (2023)
- Watchmen (2009)
- Little Children (2006)
- Moonfall (2022)
- Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013)
- The A-Team (2010)
- Annabelle Comes Home (2019)
- The Phantom of the Opera (2004)
- The Founder (2016)
- Insidious: The Last Key (2018)
- Jay Kelly (2025)
- Bone Tomahawk (2015)
- The Alamo (2004)
- In the Tall Grass (2019)
- The Commuter (2018)
- Morning Glory (2010)
- Passengers (2008)
- Hard Candy (2005)
TV (6)
Where to start with Patrick Wilson
The Conjuring is the sensible starting point, because it is both the best film in his largest franchise and a clear demonstration of his core trick: absolute earnestness, played without a wink, which is what lets the haunted house material land.
Before the horror years, Hard Candy and Little Children are the two performances that show what a strange and precise actor he can be when the script is willing to be unkind.
Fargo is the pick of his television work, a quiet, decent policeman written with real wit. Insidious is the scarier of his two horror franchises in its first outing. Bone Tomahawk is the odd one, a slow western that turns very nasty, and Aquaman is the one to watch if you just want to see him enjoy himself in a gold helmet.
The Conjuring films
Ed Warren across five films, played entirely straight and with real warmth, which is much of why the series works better than its premise deserves. The first Conjuring is the best-made horror film of the last fifteen years by a fair margin.
Insidious
The other James Wan franchise, and the one he eventually directed himself. The first Insidious is the scariest and the sequels get progressively more mythological. The Red Door is his debut behind the camera.
The work outside horror
The career people forget. Hard Candy and Little Children are both extremely uncomfortable and both excellent. Fargo is the television work, Bone Tomahawk is the western, and Aquaman is the one his children have seen.