Owen Biography
Birthname: Owen Cunningham Wilson.
Birthday: November 18th, 1969.
Astrological sign: Scorpio.
Birthplace: Dallas, Texas, United States.
Height: 5’10″
Owen grew up in Texas with his mother, Laura (a wonderful photographer), father Robert (an executive) and his brothers Andrew (older) and Luke (younger). Owen was expelled from St. Mark’s Academy in Dallas Texas in the tenth grade and finished up sophomore year at Thomas Jefferson School, and then headed to a military academy in New Mexico. He then attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he met fellow writer Wes Anderson. Together they wrote the screenplay http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109322/ and sent it to screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson, who sent it to producer Polly Platt who in turn gave it to James L. Brooks, who gave the Texans $5 million dollars to make it into a feature film. After making the film, Owen moved to Hollywood, setting up house with his two brothers and Anderson.
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“Sometimes I stop and think how strange this all is. Something that began as a little idea in Austin, that Wes and I just walked around talking about between ourselves, has turned into all this.” – on how his career has turned out.
“The walk off was the most uncomfortable scene for me to shoot, cos I literally have never danced in public or really even in private. I’m not a musical person and we had to dance like Michael Jackson and we had to do breakdancing…” – about the walk off scene in Zoolander.
“I guess a lot of me in the sense is like Dignan, that’s my sense of humor. The stuff that Dignan is doing is what I would do. When we test-screened the movie I realized that not everybody laughed where I did. I realized there’s not a big audience for my type of humor. Dignan doesn’t have self-awareness. Donald Trump has none either. When I read “The Art of the Deal” I laughed at that because neither of them realize how funny they are” – about his character Dignan in Bottle Rocket.
“We spent so much time together that I can remember us being in our teens and our dad saying we should try to find some other friends because he thought we were our own lowest common denominator when we got together.” - on his brothers
“I can’t think of a movie I wish I’d acted in, but there are movies I wish I’d written.”
“In college I took a Shakespeare class because I was an English major, and they had a Summer program called Shakespeare at Winedale, which is out in the German Hill country in Texas , where you go out and live for two months and then you perform three plays at the end of that time. And people from Austin drive out and see it. I was supposed to be one of the two gentlemen of Verona . And I got out there and I just could not stand being out there. There were also so many lines to memorize that it was just overwhelming for me. So I ended up going home and I got an F.”
“I’m not 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.”
“To me, being cool is just the opposite of living. It’s about not getting too worked up about anything, by being ‘Nyah, nyah, nyah,’ and no big deal. I can’t stand that. It’s such a jaded, clichéd posture to take. I get real enthusiastic about stuff. It’s what I think is life-affirming.”
“The director made that decision not to use my butt…I don’t know how to interpret that.” – on having a body double for a scene in You, Me and Dupree.
“I was reading some Bob Dylan interview where he said, ‘It beats nine-to-five. It beat it yesterday, it beats it today, and it will beat it tomorrow.’ That’s how I feel. I just thank God that I’m able to make a living doing something that I can have a good time doing, and be creative.”
“There’s that great quote from Beckett, I think, ‘He had an abiding sense of melancholy that sustained him through brief periods of joy.’ I like that, because I’m definitely an up-and-down person.”
(Before meeting with James L. Brooks about “Bottle Rocket”) “Luke and I had a punching fight. I had scratch marks down my face. I had to get on the plane. It’s really emotional fighting your brother. We were crying a little bit on the flight. We went to the meeting. It was such a heavy vibe from us, they didn’t even ask us what had happened to our faces.”
“It’s that middle brother syndrome. The older child has a very clear identity, and the baby gets a lot of attention. The middle brother is a little bit in no-man’s land. That might give you a little bit of sensitivity, a feeling that you’re not clearly on the winning team, you know?”
“I think of myself as a doom person. I’m a worrier. But I like the idea of being an optimist. Maybe I’m the kind of optimist who deep down knows it’s not going to work.”
