Except you want to strip punctuation from the beginning or end. The above regex only works if there is punctuation at both beginning and end.

If removing any trailing/leading punctuation is in fact your goal, what about something like:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $word = 'Wilmer",';

$word =~ s/^  \W*?          # ignore any leading punc 
            ( \w .*? )      # swallow everything lazily
            (?: \W+  )? $   # ignore any trailing punc
          /$1/x;            

print $word;
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Update: Mind you, at that point, a much simpler regex will likely serve you better in terms of speed and readability:

$word =~ s/(?:^\W+)|(?:\W+$)//g;
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Final update - benchmark:

               Rate     capture non_capture
capture     16561/s          --        -28%
non_capture 22861/s         38%          --
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The second suggestion is about 30% faster, on average.

Additionally, \w doesn't mean what you think it means.

I did basically your second regexp there in two steps. I will try the yours, though. I am curious the difference in speed between them. Of course I am wondering what you mean by \w doesn't mean what I think I mean.

from perlre:

A "\w" matches a single alphanumeric character (an alphabetic 
character, or a decimal digit) or "_"...
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Thus your earlier use of [^\w\d] had the set of digits in it twice, which suggested to me that you thought that \w means [A-Za-z].

[^\w\d] works, but is redundant and equivalent to \W

Update: You asked what the speed difference between the two passes and one pass:

s/(?:^\W+)|(?:\W+$)//g;
# versus
s/\W+$//g;
s/^\W+//g;

# my unscientific benchmark
                Rate  single_pass    two_pass
single_pass  15829/s           --        -11%
two_pass     17737/s          12%          --
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Doing it in two passes seems to be about 10-15% faster.

The \w means "any alphanumeric character or underscore." So in your regex, where you have [^\w\d] it's a bit redundant. \w can be replaced by [a-zA-Z0-9_] so you're writing [a-zA-Z0-9_0-9] in the regexen above.

Also note that since \w includes the underscore you're matching more than what you say you want.