The invisible A-lister: why Owen Wilson is everywhere, but still underappreciated
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The best thing about Marvel’s new Loki television series is that it’s trying to be the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as directed by Wes Anderson. The second best thing about it is Owen Wilson as a sad-sack time cop named Mobius.
It would be an exaggeration to say Mobius is the part Wilson was born to play. The part he was born to play was mescaline-fuelled novelist Eli Cash in The Royal Tenenbaums (“Everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn – what this book presupposes is…maybe he didn’t?”).
After just one episode, though, there is a sense Loki represents something new for the actor known for his chilled aura and crooked grin. He’s affably hangdog as a senior member of the Time Variance Authority, a cosmic bureaucracy which has put a halt to the temporal galavanting of Tom Hiddleston’s titular trickster god Loki.
The TVA, we soon discover, is a sort of inter-dimensional FBI. Its job is essentially to prevent a time traveller going back and shooting Hitler or helping Gareth Southgate score his Euro 96 penalty. Because if any of those events were to happen the world would be thrown into chaos (Three Lions would have been at number one for the rest of the Nineties).
Even for Marvel, with its talking racoons and Brie Larson trying to be likeable, it’s all quite flaky – a sort of bonfire of the eccentricities. And the one holding it together is Wilson.
This makes absolute sense. Whether playing a drugged-out novelist or Ben Stiller’s nemesis, Hansel, in Zoolander (“I wasn't like every other kid, you know, who dreams about being an astronaut, I was always more interested in what bark was made out of on a tree…”) he’s alway been pretty out there. Loki is pretty out there too. It’s a match forged in quirky TV heaven.
Wilson at 52 is the invisible A-lister. His movies have cumulatively grossed more than $2.25 million in the US alone. He’s been the voice of a Disney-Pixar franchise (Cars) and has a writing credit for one of the greatest films of the past 25 years (The Royal Tenenbaums – or Zoolander, you choose). And he has moved easily between comedy (Zoolander) and tragedy (Zoolander 2).
He’s the secret weapon in everything he’s in. Loki simply wouldn’t work without Wilson. True, it features a winningly comedic turn from Hiddleston – a surprise given that, in the BBC’s Night Manager, he was thoroughly out-acted by Hugh Laurie and by Hugh Laurie’s eyebrows.
Yet it is Wilson who feels best attuned to the offbeat atmosphere. This is no surprise as he is himself the embodiment of offbeat.
Wilson has never been easy to pin down. Is he comedic actor? He’s funny but not really a pratfaller. A leading man? He tried to be in the 2001 action-thriller Behind Enemy Lines, for which his friend Stiller suggested he deserved an Oscar nomination for “best running”. The truth is he’s neither one nor the other. His true facility is for clicking into whatever he’s in while never being less than 110 per cent Owen Wilson.
This is surely his greatest talent. Wilson’s filmography is varied, sometimes wildly so – the only thread running though it the immutability of his Owen Wilson-ness.
He started out as an art-house brat, collaborating with Wes Anderson on 1996’s Bottle Rocket. But even in the late Nineties he was trying new things. He was devoured by a CGI snake in the horror b-flick Anaconda and, in Michael Bay’s Armageddon, played space-going geologist Oscar Choi.
That was followed by a move into action comedy as he teamed up with Jackie Chan in martial arts Western Shanghai Noon. Then in 2001 he scored the incredible one-two of The Royal Tenenbaums and Zoolander, projects inhabiting opposite ends of the cinematic cosmos yet equally works of genius.
That same year also saw him channel the Stallone within for Behind Enemy Lines. And he benefitted from the revival of the frat-comedy through the 2000s. He appeared alongside Charlie Sheen and Morgan Freeman in espionage giggle-fest The Big Bounce in 2004 and hooked up with Stiller for a remake of Seventies cop series Starsky and Hutch.
Even then, he was just getting started. Wilson walked an irresistible line between cheesy and heartfelt opposite Vince Vaughan in Wedding Crashers (2005) – a hit that poured fuel on the vogue for r-rated chuckle extravaganzas. Yet just a few months later he was charming children as the voice of Lightning McQueen in Pixar’s Cars.
He doubled down on his credential as family entertainer opposite Jennifer Aniston in shaggy dog story Marley and Me in 2008. That was on the heels of another romping comedy, Drillbit Taylor (about a homeless beggar passing himself off as a bodyguard to two bullied school kids – and based on a treatment by the late John Hughes). Was there anything he couldn’t do?
Apparently not. In addition to completing the Night at the Museum trilogy with on-screen bestie Stiller in 2014 (as miniature cowboy Jedediah) he also graced Paul Thomas Anderson’s Thomas Pynchon-adapted surrealist noir Inherent Vice (like most people, Wilson has no idea what it’s about).
One of his favourite projects, he has stated, was Midnight In Paris, in which he collaborated with Woody Allen and fulfilled a dream by living for several months in France. He plays a screenwriter suffering a professional and personal malaise who ambles into 1920s Paris. He meets figures such as Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, and has his creative batteries restored. It’s a highlight of late-period, pre-cancelled Woody Allen. And it’s the perfect showcase for Wilson’s off-beat raffishness.
Allen recognised he was working with a special talent too. The part of Gil was tailored for Wilson by the director. The character was initially supposed to be a New York intellectual. Allen, though, was drawn to the sad surfer quality that Wilson emanated and overhauled the script. “I thought Owen would be charming and funny but my fear was that he was not so Eastern at all in his persona,” he observed.
Yet for all those achievements Wilson’s life is also tinged with tragedy. In August 2007, was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles following an apparent suicide attempt. His lawyer revealed the actor had been taking antidepressants. Shortly afterwards Wilson dropped out of Tropic Thunder, his part going to Matthew McConaughey.
There was obviously speculation as to what had prompted him to take such drastic action. He had broken up several months previously with actress Kate Hudson. However those close to Wilson were quick to quell rumours of a connection. “It would be irresponsible to say it was any single thing,” one associate told People Magazine in 2007. “People are complicated.”
As with many catapulted into the spotlight, Wilson has not always had the easiest relationship with fame. Addiction issues led to several stints in rehab. And following his hospitalisation he became a target for paparazzi “Why are you running? Are you scared?” photographers are said to have shouted as he fled New York night club Butter in November 2007.
His personal life scans as nearly as chaotic as Loki’s time-travel plot. In 2020 it was claimed that Wilson had never met three-year-old daughter, Lyla Aranya Wilson, despite the fact that he and her mother Varunie Vongsvirates were an item for nearly five years (he pays $25,0000 per month in child support). He has two sons, a 10 year-old with ex-girlfriend Jade Duell and a seven year-old with his already married fitness trainer Caroline Lindqvist.
Wilson’s screen persona is a sort of convoluted amiability – a reflection of what he’s like in real life, one is tempted to conclude. He was born into wealth as the son of a Dallas TV executive father and photographer mother and attended St Marks private school in Dallas (also the alma mater of Tommy Lee Jones) but was expelled for cheating at geometry. His parents next shipped him off to the $20,000 per year New Mexico Military Institute. Later, he went to the University of Texas, dropping out to make Bottle Rocket with pal and soulmate Anderson.
Anderson was likewise from a well-off background. These experiences as the children of Texas blue-bloods were poured into their script to 1998’s Rushmore, which starred Owen’s talented younger brother Luke.
The more conventionally handsome of the siblings, it felt Luke was the one cut out for stardom. Alas, he never fulfilled that potential while Owen, with seemingly effortlessness, became a fixture through the 2000s. He found a kindred spirit in Ben Stiller, with whom he made six films, and in Vaughan, his co-star in Wedding Crashers.
Running the gauntlet of addiction and fame brought Wilson to a dark place in his 20 and 30s. Now the wrong side of 50, he comes across as more at peace with life, the universe and everything.
“We’re on the back nine,” he told Conan O’Brien in 2017, employing a golfing metaphor to describe growing old. “I find myself taking more walks – things as a kid I didn’t do. Go for a walk? Where? Now they have e-bikes. You just bomb around. You feel like you’re a kid on a ten-speed. We have to be happy in middle age.”
That sense of wry acceptance shines through in Loki. In his comedies, Wilson has always come across as laid-back – but slightly dazed with it. Yet there’s wisdom in Mobius, which feels like a new register for him. Having made it this far, with Loki he is perhaps ready to give the performance of his life.
