For screenwriter and producer Jonas Pate, Wilmington, North Carolina, embodies “pogue” life—his term for kids set loose on the marshes, hopping on boats, wakeboarding, and camping on Masonboro Island. Life in coastal Carolina, he says, is centered around a love of the outdoors.
Best known as showrunner, director, and executive producer of the hit Netflix series Outer Banks, the North Carolina native grew up traveling to nearby Wrightsville Beach for annual family reunions. “It was as good as Christmas when I was a kid,” Pate says. “You would get to hang out with all your cousins, go crabbing, jump off the dock, and just play in the waves.” Pate left the state for college and then cut his teeth in the film industry in Los Angeles. After twenty years away, he felt the tug back to southeastern North Carolina, wanting his children to enjoy the same kind of adventurous adolescence he’d loved.
A lesser-known side of Wilmington made his move back exceedingly logical; the city has long been one of the country’s biggest film hubs outside of L.A. The mixed terrain provides versatile backdrops for shooting—beaches, a historic downtown, the University of North Carolina Wilmington campus, and swamps—alongside the studios at Cinespace, formerly EUE Screen Gems.
Working in this community has provided Pate with abundant inspiration. He serves on the governor’s film commission, and his newest teen series, The Runarounds, is scheduled for release this fall on Amazon Prime. Shot in Wilmington, the show costars Brooklyn Decker and tells the story of a group of teenagers who form a band during the summer after graduating from high school. The series taps that exuberant, youthful summertime feeling that stitches through Pate’s oeuvre.
The Wilmington scene certainly keeps Pate busy—he also recently worked on a small movie, Driver’s Ed, directed by Bobby Farrelly and produced by his wife, Jen Pate. “The crews are really connected,” Pate says. “If anybody’s doing a short film, we’ll all jump in and help out. It feels a lot more communal than any other film community that I’ve ever been in.”
Here, Pate drops inside the landscape that so inspires his work to share his perfect day around North Carolina’s Port City, a.k.a. Wilmywood.
Top of the Morning
“A perfect day in Wilmington definitely involves the water,” Pate says. His day might begin with a Yoga Salt class on Crystal Pier. “Wilmington has inordinately good yoga,” he says. “Wilmington Yoga Center, Longwave, Salt—after having lived in California for twenty years, it’s just as good.”
After class, he refuels with coffee or a smoothie from Sundays, a café overlooking Wrightsville Beach that’s popular among the surfer set and UNC Wilmington students. Separated from the mainland by the Intracoastal Waterway, Wrightsville Beach boasts incredible surfing only a twenty-minute drive from downtown. The next step on his perfect day might involve hopping on a boat with family and friends to cruise over to Masonboro Island, an 8.4-mile barrier island and nature reserve, to surf and search for sand dollars.
Midday Breaks
Back on land, Beach Bagels is a popular pre- or post-beach pit stop—Pate recommends the Annie, a turkey BLT riff dressed up with jalapeños. Nearby Airlie Gardens, which dates to the 1700s, features local fauna and flora, including Venus flytraps—the carnivorous plant is native to this small pocket of the Carolinas.
Mad Mole Brewing is one of Pate’s neighborhood watering holes. Someone on his group text chain will frequently put out the call to bike over for a beer and a bite from local food trucks parked outside. Every weekend, different acoustic bands will play, and the venue is dog-friendly, ideal for Pate and his fifteen-year-old golden retriever, Maddy.
Evening Wind-Down
“Wilmington is amazing because it’s a city on the rise,” Pate says, adding that he’s watched Southern coastal cities like Charleston recover after storms. Wilmington was devastated by Hurricane Florence in 2018, but ever since the pandemic brought in waves of new residents, the city has boomed. With that, the food scene is flourishing too.
Since 2021, two new culinary heavyweights have opened their doors: Origins, an upscale modern American restaurant en route to the beach, and Seabird, serving fresh spins on Southern classics downtown, whose chef and co-owner, Dean Neff, was named a semifinalist for the James Beard Outstanding Chef Award in 2024. Pate’s newest favorite is Olivero, a Mediterranean restaurant that draws inspiration from chef Sunny Gerhart’s merchant sailor great-grandfather. Pate recommends the lasagna but stands by the restaurant in its entirety: “You can throw a dart at the menu and you’re going to be happy.”
