Feature

The Player

Ever since his flamboyantly funny turn in Anderson’s 1996 Sundance hit turned flop turned cult favorite Bottle Rocket, Wilson has searched for the kind of roles that suit his goofy enthusiasm. With those sandy good looks, though, he couldn’t refuse lucrative and ludicrous macho parts in films like Armageddon, not to mention Anaconda, which he sparked up with another ad-lib: “Is it just me, or does the jungle make you really, really horny?”

Outside Anderson’s orbit, Wilson quickly learned his limits. First, he recognized that he didn’t have much so-called range, at least in the stunt-casting sense: “I’m not going to play a guy with MS or a guy in a wheelchair,” he says frankly. “I can play a dramatic character, certainly, but I’m not the real chameleon-type actor who, you know, changes his voice and everything.”

Wilson trademarked the role of the exuberant fool—radiating what his ex-girlfriend Sheryl Crow once called “strident naiveté.”

Instead, he trademarked the role of the exuberant fool, a man utterly lost in dreams of manly heroism, radiating what his ex-girlfriend Sheryl Crow once called “strident naïveté.” Over and over, his characters have been our comic Don Quixotes, aspiring to chivalric ideals, then failing, then finding some moral victory in the end—a welcome antidote to the current era of overcooked heroism.

Wedding Crashers could be his biggest hit yet, but even that poses a threat. For maintaining control over a script is one thing—and managing this kind of fame is another. Sure, most of the new attention is highly flattering. Elizabeth Crane’s new novel, All This Heavenly Glory, even begins with a seven-page, one-sentence personal ad that begs the handsome actor to come to the altar: “[I]n search of Owen Wilson for long-term relationship possibly involving children . . . [T]he hope is that O.W. will exhibit an inviting and exhilarating humanity . . . ”

Other responses have not been so positive. As we high-mindedly discuss comic formulas, Wilson is interrupted—he sets down his handset and picks up his ringing cell phone, immediately raising his voice. “I know! Everybody knows that it’s a total lie!” I immediately realize what he must be talking about: a trashy gossip item from the day before, alleging that he’d had kinky sex (gasp!) after, of all things, a wedding. As the mellow actor briefly loses his cool, it’s a reminder that, in this blind-item adult culture, it’s nearly impossible to hold on to your dignity, let alone your optimism. He fumes into his phone: “I haven’t been to a wedding in ten years!”

Well, the gossip can’t hurt him too much. As Wilson’s wedding crasher knows, there are few things more attractive than a vulnerable cad.