Marley & Me star Owen Wilson on the quirks of life and why that excites him more than 'just telling jokes'
Marley & Me star Owen Wilson on the quirks of life and why that excites him more than 'just telling jokes'
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There is something about Owen Wilson that money can't buy. He's small, vital, perhaps, with his pugilist's nose and shaggy blond hair, a bit scruffy in the wrong light. But that 'something', whatever it is, has brought him one of Hollywood's most interestingly individual careers as an actor, producer, writer and now co-star with more than 30 dogs and Jennifer Aniston in Marley & Me.
"One of my best scenes in the film is when Marley, the dog, has eaten Jenny's necklace and I am in the backyard, looking for the missing jewellery in Marley's poop," he comments in his slack, laconic Texan drawl.
"Luckily, I grew up with dogs so making Marley was a lot of fun for me.
However, my own dog, Garcia, was not very happy when we were making it. I reckon it was his least favourite shoot as I would come back to my trailer smelling of other dogs. Eventually he'd just sit there with an expression that said: 'OK, who have you been staying out cheating on me with?'"
Based on the best-selling book of American newspaper columnist John Grogan about his family's relationship with their neurotic dog, Marley, the film is the story of the arc of a marriage rather than a dog movie. Wilson and Aniston play newlyweds who age from 22 to 40 with Marley, at first a cute, 12lb yellow Labrador pup who turns into a 100lb four-legged fiasco.
"The marriage doesn't turn out the way the Grogans imagined it would," comments Wilson drily.
Marley & Me, directed by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) and co-starring Kathleen Turner and Alan Arkin, is Wilson's 30th film.
We noticed him first in his billing as Robin's obnoxious date in Jim Carry's 1997 black comedy The Cable Guy.
Since then, there has been big box office fare like Shanghai Noon/Knights, Meet the Parents, Zoolander, The Wedding Crashers, most recently The Darjeeling Limited.
While Wilson might joke about his naked ambition, he was well-known in the industry as a writer and producer before he started acting and has been Oscar-nominated as writer of The Royal Tenenbaums and associate produced the Oscar-winning As Good As It Gets.
Distinguished by his asymmetric nose, that remains unfixed after being broken once in the ninth grade and again in a college football accident, he doesn't quite fit the tightly-tucked world of showbiz. Laid-back, intelligent and visibly goofy, he's billed as a heartthrob in the popular press, but is clearly much more interesting than that.
"I thought that I'd be married by the time I was 30 (he is 40) and be starting a family," he jokes, "but it just hasn't worked out that way. It's strange. Being from Texas I would have thought that would give me the appearance of a solid kind of cowboy, something that would separate me from those New York and LA pretty boys.
"I think that there's something about being in Hollywood. I don't know if I'm shallow, but you want to make sure that you make the right choice because you know that it's forever and I didn't realise that I have such a strong scientific side that demands that I experiment with and compare women." (He has been attached to singer Sheryl Crow, actresses Demi Moore, Gina Gershon and Kate Hudson. After his break-up with Hudson, with whom he co-starred in You, Me and Dupree, he reportedly fell into a depression and allegedly attempted suicide but has never spoken publicly about it. )
"Actually, to be honest, a shotgun wedding might be the way to go for me. You can't stay at the party forever. At some point, you have to take stock and ask yourself: What am I doing here?"
Wilson is one of a band of brothers, the Wilson clan Andrew, Owen and Luke who all seem to write, act, produce and direct successfully. Born and bred in Dallas, Texas, their Irish-American childhood was New Age "as much as you could be in Texas". Their father ran a television station and their mother is photographer Laura Cunningham Wilson, who used to work with Richard Avedon.
"We three brothers are very close. We have our own connection that other people donu00c2u00b9t understand. We started messing about in movies and that was it.
"We've never really competed. Luke (the youngest of the three) and I once both went up for the same role in There's Something About Mary but Ben Stiller got it. It didnu00c2u00b9t matter. Ben and I are best friends and have made eight films together." (See them later this year in Night at the Museum 2 Battle of the Smithsonian.)
He remembers their childhood as being very good, running wild in summers on the lake in boats, building forts up creeks, and going to a school called Lamplighter where they really "encouraged the inner you".
"If you weren't much good at math they would say: 'That's OK, you love to read, so why don't you read instead?' And we'd read The Chronicles of Narnia or something like that while the girls braided the teacher's hair."
Owen's chequered school career went from being kicked out of a prestigious prep school for stealing his geometry teacher's textbook to expedite his maths homework, to a posh school where he was definingly idle and finally ending up at a military school on New Mexico from whence he graduated private first-class, "the lowest ranking person in my grade".
"I never dreamed I'd become an actor. I always thought I'd be a writer. Acting is more fun than writing. Writing is harder, more like having a term paper. I can't think of a movie I wish I'd acted in, but there are movies I wish I'd written."
His acting career has been built on writing for himself some casually eccentric comedic characters. He and fellow University of Texas graduate director Wes Anderson have been collaborating in writing and producing offbeat films (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) since the mid-nineties. They were English majors who met at a playwriting workshop and have created a menagerie of funny-sad characters whose outsize passions and foibles can never be contained by the worlds they inhabit.
"Our humour comes from insecurities or earnestness. I'm not interested in jokes or people telling jokes," says Wilson. "I've never gone to a comedy club. I think stuff that's funny is stuff in real life. It's like someone earnestly trying to talk rather than looking to make a joke. I think a lot of stuff I describe as funny is really sad.
"I thank God every day that I'm able to make a living doing something that I can have a good time doing, and be creative. I'm never going to play a guy with MS or a guy in a wheelchair. I can play a dramatic character, certainly, but I'm not the real chameleon-type actor who, you know, changes his voice and everything. I'm more the actor who is conscious that neurotic behaviour in a seemingly laid-back guy can be very good for a laugh.
"On the other hand, I've also developed a tradition of dying spectacularly on film. It sort of works out because by the time I die, I'm usually tired of working on that particular movie, so I look forward to it."u00a0
u00a0Courtesy/ PLANET SYNDICATION
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