Patrick Wilson returning to Big Stone Gap for film premiere

They say you can never go home again, but actor Patrick Wilson has done precisely that for his new film. The everyday-handsome leading man of such works as “Little Children,” “Watchmen,” “Angels in America” and “The Conjuring” returned to haunts he knew well for “Big Stone Gap,” opening this Friday.

“We settled there a couple hundred years ago,” Mr. Wilson told The Washington Times of the eponymous town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where he and his brother would return for summers to visit their grandparents. A road and a bridge in town even bear his family name.

“Big Stone Gap,” opening Friday, follows Ave Maria Mulligan (Ashley Judd), a fortysomething single woman who runs the town drugstore. The townsfolk would all like to see Ave Maria settle down, and her opportunity may in fact come in Mr. Wilson’s character, Jack MacChesney. The film, which takes place in the 1970s, was written and directed by Adriana Trigiani and based on a series of books she wrote about her hometown.

In his first scene, Mr. Wilson’s Jack appears in an open-front leisure suit.

“Big Stone Gap, Virginia, in the ’70s was a lot different than New York in the ’70s,” Mr. Wilson said. “Depending on how hip you were, where you came from, you might have had more fashionable stuff. All that fashion is very much a part of — forgive the pun — the fabric of the times.”

As frequently happens in romantic comedies, Ave Maria and Jack’s journey is circuitous and fraught with landmines and other suitors. The two leads are vastly different in temperament and style, and it is such a personality clash that provides a great deal of the film’s humor.

Mr. Wilson said that because Miss Judd hails from nearby Kentucky, she could invest more grounded humanity into Ave Maria, which enriched her performance and her character’s interactions with Jack.

“I see the chemistry we had on screen, and it’s great. And I think a lot of that honestly comes from the love of these people that we’re playing,” Mr. Wilson said. “She lives these people, she knows these people. You feel like you’re strangely honoring where you came from.”

“Big Stone Gap” features a supporting cast that includes Whoopi Goldberg, Jane Krakowski, Anthony LaPaglia and Chris Sarandon.

“She’s been living with these people, writing these characters for a very long time,” Mr. Wilson said of Ms. Trigiani, adding that while the Jack of the books may be described as physically different from himself, Ms. Trigiani still gave Mr. Wilson the freedom to build Jack for the cinematic medium — although the dialect was important. “She knew that I was coming at it with such love, and I wanted to get [it] right,” he said.

Getting it right has gotten Mr. Wilson rather far as a performer. After seeing him in “The Full Monty” on Broadway, he was plucked from obscurity by director Mike Nichols for his 2003 miniseries “Angels in America” for HBO. In the four-hour event, Mr. Wilson played Joe Pitt, a closeted gay men struggling with his sexual identity as the AIDS crisis in New York was reaching its 1980s peak. The ensemble cast included Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Emma Thompson and Mary-Louise Parker as Joe Pitt’s frustrated wife, Harper, next to newcomers Justin Kirk, Ben Shenkman and Mr. Wilson.

“Mike never, ever made me feel as an amateur or inferior or any of the things I really should have been feeling,” Mr. Wilson said of being cast in the miniseries. “Mike was just a master at never making you feel like the words were bigger than you. He said, ’You’ll be fine.’ “

Nichols, who also directed the Oscar-winning “The Graduate” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” died last year at 83.

“He gave me my film career, hands down,” Mr. Wilson acknowledged gratefully.

Mr. Wilson also appeared in the comic book adventure “Watchmen,” the horror-thriller “The Conjuring” and in the TV series “Fargo,” a semi-jumping off from the Coen Bros. film of the same name. (In an ironic twist, the Minnesota set of “Fargo” was warmer, and had less snow, than back at Mr. Wilson’s home in New Jersey.)

Mr. Wilson is heading back to Big Stone Gap this weekend to celebrate the opening of the film as well as to revisit his old haunts and recall his departed grandparents. He is also sponsoring a 5K run as a way to inspire the locals to become more active in an area where fast food is perhaps too readily available.

“When you have the coal mining business going down virtually to zero, a lot of those … areas are very depressed,” Mr. Wilson said of the ongoing economic sting affecting both the wallets and the overall health picture of Appalachian communities. He hopes that his run will at least inspire the townsfolk of his youth to get off the couch and follow him around town this weekend.

“These are not cynical people,” Mr. Wilson said of the characters, real and imagined, of Big Stone Gap. “They’re great people.”