MAN ON A ROLE T

Messina visits his dark side as ‘Sharp’ detective

THE dark, sick world portrayed in HBO’s “Sharp Objects” has been the place actor Chris Messina has been trying to get to his entire career — and his good friend Amy Adams helped him on his journey.

Messina, 43, played Adams’ boyfriend in “Julie and Julia” — the 2009 big-screen Nora Ephron comedy about a blogger who makes it her mission to cook all of Julia Child’s recipes — and the two became good friends.

“I wanted another shot with Amy when I wasn’t just eating her food and telling her how delicious it was,” says Messina, who adds that he had a “nice guy” problem. “I did ‘ Six Feet Under’ and I played a Republican nice guy in that. And then Woody Allen cast me as a Republican nice guy in ‘Vicky Christina Barcelona,’ ” he says. “If you do something halfway decent in Hollywood they just want you to do it over and over again. My job is to keep convincing people that they haven’t seen anything yet.”

Adams had to persuade “Sharp Objects” director Jean-Marc Vallée, who won an Emmy last year for “Big Little Lies,” to meet with Messina about the role of Richard Willis, a big-city detective who is sent to the tight-lipped town of Wind Gap, Mo., to investigate a double murder. He stumbles across a bigger mystery: an alcoholic journalist named Camille Preaker (Adams) covering the same case whose connections to the place have left severe psychic — and physical — scars.

“I came in and read and still it wasn’t a done deal. And [Adams] really pushed for me to get the part,” Messina says. “I think she wanted someone around her — and there are several of us — that she trusted and felt comfortable with as she had to go to these extreme dark places.”

Messina describes “Sharp Objects” as a cross between “Big Little Lies” and “True Detective,” but a better antecedent is “Chinatown,” the 1974 movie about a gumshoe (Jack Nicholson) trying to save a doomed woman (Faye Dunaway). Messina, who grew up on Long Island (Northport), kept the movie on a loop in his trailer for inspiration while he was filming — and as Willis followed Camille into the pit of her family history.

“He knows that there’s more to this woman and this story. And he knows he can use her for some information. At the end of the first episode he offers to drive her home,” Messina says. “I think he’s new to seeing a case like this. How much of it is he just trying to be a nice guy and how much is he trying to get a date out of it?”

Willis is unprepared for what Camille ultimately reveals in a moment of intimacy — her body is a crossword puzzle of scars — and Messina was shocked. “I had walked into the makeup trailer where she had to have those [scars] on [from] a previous day. To see your friend with that on was shocking. Because it was so real. And so detailed. It was gross. It was hard. It was painful to look at.”

Messina, who lives in LA with producer Jennifer Todd (“Jason Bourne”) and their two sons, Milo, 10, and Giovanni, 8, spent his highschool summers working on lobster boats before paying his dues in New York theater. “I played all these delinquents and drug addicts and complicated characters,” he says. He has appeared on a wide assortment of TV shows, most notably a recurring role as Danny Castellano, Mindy Kaling’s boyfriend on “The Mindy Project.” How does he think the fans of that lighthearted show will react to seeing him go to the dark side on “Sharp Objects”? “I don’t know. I hope they dig it,” he says. “It’s definitely very different, but [it’s] fantastic for any actor to be seen in a different light.”