OWEN WILSON
IS WOWING ONCE AGAIN.
When Owen Wilson was shooting Loki, he worried that audiences wouldn’t find his talky scenes with Tom Hiddleston sufficiently “compelling”. As if. Over 25-ish years, Wilson has established himself as a captivating talker, the kind you lean in and listen to as if his every line is a variant on “Just give in to the power of the tea.”
If this makes his casting as a TV presenter with a “soothing whisper” in director Brit McAdams’ Paint seem especially on-brand, rest assured: other opportunities to be soothed also await. After Loki, Wilson returns to superhero turf for Secret Headquarters, about a kid who realises his dad might have an alterego. Although his role remains hush-hush, Wilson’s spectral tenor will surely benefit director Justin Simien’s Haunted Mansion makeover. Before then, Wilson will coheadline She-Hulk director Kat Coiro’s romcom Marry Me, where Jennifer Lopez’s pop singer asks a man from her audience to wed her.
Audiences have been (softly) saying “I do” to Wilson since Bottle Rocket, the 1996 showcase for his chemistry with director Wes Anderson. After smaller roles in Anaconda and Armageddon, the actor established himself as a winning draw in comedies from Wedding Crashers to Shanghai Noon, his measured diction and loose demeanour making light work of the gag-lifting. And that languid style made for fine couplings with the tighter-wound Ben Stiller from Starsky & Hutch to Zoolander, where Wilson’s Hansel imbibed the tea.
Anderson helped tease gentler-still qualities from his friend/co-writer in films from The Royal Tenenbaums to The French Dispatch, where Wilson plays a travel writer. Elsewhere, his travels took in surprise action (No Escape) and arthouse-ish (Inherent Vice) detours - and he navigated them with deceptively effortless, easy-rider conviction.
He also proved fine casting as the nostalgic writer in Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, a romantic fantasy with a time-travel twist. Temporal issues, of course, also propel Loki, to which audiences hope Wilson’s Mobius will return to transform exposition into magic dust again. “It’s not enough just to be real,” Wilson once said of acting. “You have to try to make it interesting or entertaining.” When he speaks, we’re all ears.
ETA | 2022 / MARRY ME AND SECRET HEADQUARTERS WILL BE RELEASED NEXT YEAR. PAINT AND HAUNTED MANSION ARE TBC.