Leading the pack
Interview | Ben Lawrence This month the slacker generation’s pin-up actor Owen Wilson graduates to leading man status, thanks to Marley & Me, the number one US box office smash. Yet he insists none of this was planned… OWEN WILSON DOESN’T like thinking about the future. “I think life is what happens when you’re making [...]
Interview | Ben Lawrence
This month the slacker generation’s pin-up actor Owen Wilson graduates to leading man status, thanks to Marley & Me, the number one US box office smash. Yet he insists none of this was planned…
OWEN WILSON DOESN’T like thinking about the future. “I think life is what happens when you’re making other plans,” he smiles. The oft-worn cliché is more forgiveable from him in light of the recent dramatic turns in his personal life – more of which later. At this moment, though, as he lounges on a plush settee in a sun-drenched Santa Monica hotel suite, Wilson clearly looks like an anti-plan-maker. With his blond, surfer-style hair and slow, Texas-tinged drawl,
he seems more akin to the wastrels he regularly plays on screen. He is smiling often, even cracking a few jokes, which might not seem all
that remarkable, but, in this instance, it most certainly is. A few days earlier, Wilson had walked out of an interview with USA Today.
That day, the 40-year-old actor was doing publicity alongside Jennifer Aniston, his co-star in the American box-office hit Marley &
Me, talking amiably about the film, an adaptation of John Grogan’s surprisingly successful memoir about life with his dog. The
interview turned into a dog’s dinner, however, when the journalist asked a few too many personal questions. Both Wilson and Aniston have endured turbulent private lives: Aniston’s every thought, imagined or real, about her ex-husband Brad Pitt and his second wife Angelina Jolie graces the cover of gossip magazines. And Wilson shocked his fans with his suicide attempt in August 2007, overdosing on unspecified pills in the wake of his split from actress Kate Hudson. So the USA Today reporter was asked to keep his questions focused on the movie. When the reporter asked whether having a pet dog could help in times of loneliness, Wilson walked out.
Thankfully, he stays put today, although obviously he shows no desire to talk about Hudson or his subsequent actions. He focuses on the positive, and for Wilson, professionally at least, things are on the up. “I guess Marley & Me could open new doors for me,” he offers. “But honestly, I didn’t think of that when I took the movie. I just liked the fact that the film was held together by the sense of family and very universal themes, the idea that you get 15 years into a marriage, and you realise where your life is.”
The film does represent something of a departure for Wilson. As a writer and an actor, he has forged a career that has become synonymous with that of longtime collaborator Wes Anderson – they co-wrote a short film, Bottle Rocket, which was made into a full-length movie in 1996, with Wilson starring and Anderson directing. Since then they worked on films such as Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums (for which Wilson got an Oscar nomination as co-writer), and The Darjeeling Limited.
After stacking up so many whimsical comedies – including his many roles opposite his friend Ben Stiller (Zoolander, Starsky & Hutch) with whom he is a leading member of the so-called ‘Frat Pack’ of quirky comic actors – it’s perhaps surprising to see Wilson as a mainstream romantic lead. Not least because his distinctive nose, although ruggedly handsome, hardly gives him the smooth looks of the matinee idol. It’s a marvel to behold: a twisting, swollen, hourglass of bone, twice-smashed and corseted by cartilage. He first broke it in ninth grade, and then again playing football at the University of Texas. Has he considered having it straightened out? “I have been asked a lot,” he smiles. “But if I were to change it I would get so much grief from my brothers!”
And yet, Marley & Me is a cosy family comedy and Wilson excels as its clean-cut lead: the film took over $50m during its first four days on release in the US, which was a new high for both Wilson and Aniston in starring roles, mixing the type of relationship comedy that powered past hits like Meet the Parents and Parenthood with the antics and sentiment of dog ownership.
“I did feel a responsibility because so many people love the book that you wanted to be kind of faithful to that,” Wilson continues. “And John and Jenny Grogan came to the set, which was a little weird for them, to see us playing them. But it’s like I said, I have never made plans, to try and do this and then this in my career. I’ve never been somebody who thought, ‘I am going to grow up, and I am going to get married and have kids’, for example. I was always the kind of person who said, ‘Just get me out of the house! Just let me survive! Let me get my own apartment!’ I have always been an in-themoment kind of person, obviously.”
Born in Texas, to a photographer mother and a father who was an advertising executive and operator of a public television station, Wilson grew up the middle of three boys: older brother Andrew, and younger Luke, who often co-stars with Owen. Apparently, Wilson was expelled from his Dallas school when, in the tenth grade, he stole his teacher’s textbook. He was then sent to high school at the New Mexico Military Institute.
“When I was growing up, I had no huge wanting to be an actor or to work in movies,” he says. “If I thought that was really a possibility, I would have. My brothers and I, we saw every movie that came out and always loved going to see movies. It just didn’t seem possible to have this life, and I think to have said something like that, people would have thought we were putting on airs. ‘I’m going to Hollywood!’ And they’d have been like [sarcastically] ‘Of course you are!’
“It’s funny, the first movie that Luke and I worked on was Bottle Rocket. They just had the DVD come out of that so I watched it
and they had a ‘making of’ and some different extras. It was kind of odd hearing our accents. They were so strong! I still have an accent, but Luke’s accent was totally Southern! He sounded like he was from Gone with the Wind!
“It’s like this movie, how you can’t really plan how things will work out. You just have to be open to the ride. I’ve always been superstitious about just kind of letting things unfold. That just seems to be the way it happened for me.”
In the film, as one may suspect, there is plenty of planning, much of it family orientated. Wilson recognises that he, too, enjoyed a strong family upbringing and at least hints that he’d like a family of his own, eventually. “I think that we’re a pretty close family, and I don’t see how that could not be a benefit,” he says. “On set I loved having the children around, our children in the film, Patrick, Conor and Lucy…” He stops for a moment. “Wait, was it Colleen..?”
“That was her real name, the actress! That was the actress’s name!” offers a passing Jennifer Aniston, who’s popped her head round the door at the just right moment to see her co-star stumble. Wilson shrugs it off. “Actually, my mother still calls me Andrew, sometimes. But that’s just because we sound alike! Where was I going with this?”
We were talking about children. “Oh yeah, they were easy, compared to the dogs. There were a whole bunch of different dogs for Marley, and it was crazy. Even dog ownership doesn’t prepare you for that!” Wilson has an Australian cattle dog. “It was a little like Marley, in that for the first couple years, he was super high-energy and rambunctious.
“And like Marley, I did have a Labrador once, when I was first in Los Angeles, where I was living with my younger brother, and Wes [Anderson]. We lived in not a great part of town, and had our chocolate brown Lab, called Blue, out there with us. We were robbed three times at our house, twice with our dog there. The cop said, ‘I think you need to get a new dog; Labradors are so friendly, even to criminals.’”
Did they take that advice? “Of course not,” he smiles. “That would have required planning.”
Marley & Me is released in the UK on 13 March
