Post by Remi on Jul 23, 2006 12:06:36 GMT -5
San Francisco Chronicle
Battle of the exes
Hugh Hart
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Luke Wilson (left) hangs out with his brother Owen at the July 12 New York premiere of "My Super Ex-Girlfriend." Reuters photo by Eric Thayer
(07-23) 04:00 PDT Los Angeles -- Cameron Diaz, Sarah Jessica Parker, Drew Barrymore, Reese Witherspoon, Kate Hudson, Heather Graham and now Uma Thurman.
Confronted with the roll call of his leading ladies, Luke Wilson jokes, "I've had 'em all!" He's kidding. "On paper, I'm like Warren Beatty, but my own personal life tends to put things in perspective, more than I think I'd like for them to be."
Wilson's self-deprecating, laid-back charm has made him a fixture in romantic comedies ranging from "The Family Stone" to "Legally Blonde" and "Charlie's Angels." Sitting on a park bench overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, a few blocks from his home, Wilson squints into the horizon as he ponders his popularity with top-billed actresses.
"I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing," he says. "Sometimes I'll start thinking, wait a second, am I not threatening enough, that these women want to work with me? Does this mean, you know, they think there's no edge there: the meek boyfriend that'll do anything? I don't know how that's happened, but I've really had fun working with those actresses, and you do learn from all of them."
In "My Super Ex-Girlfriend," which opened this weekend, one week after older brother Owen's "You, Me and Dupree" hit theaters, Wilson plays Matt, a mild-mannered New York architect who falls for Thurman's G-Girl, who uses her superpowers to fly around the city catching evildoers and preventing catastrophes. Despite the wall-wrecking supersex, he breaks up with G-Girl, prompting the woman scorned to sling Matt's car into orbit, throw a live shark through his bedroom window and burn obscenities onto his forehead with her laser vision.
Wilson tries to keep the proceedings grounded in some semblance of reality.
"I just think it's more funny to react to that stuff as if it happened to me in real life by playing it straight and not feeling like you have to top it," he says. "It feels more comfortable to me, and I think it can be more funny, in a Bob Newhart kind of way."
That approach sets him apart from his more antic peers, namely Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn, with whom he starred in "Old School." Ivan Reitman, director of "My Super Ex-Girlfriend," who's famous for "Ghostbusters" and "Stripes," got to know Wilson when he produced the frat-pack comedy a few years ago.
"I thought Luke was sort of the glue that held 'Old School' together," Reitman says. "He's the kind of guy we all want as our friend, both men and women, because he's this all-American guy from the middle of the country who's comfortable in his own skin. Even though Uma has a spectacular, colorful role, the story's really told through Luke, and he gets to blow it out, comically speaking."
Long before Wilson became a fixture in high-concept studio comedies, he was honing his chops in Dallas, spurred by a family of cutups.
"As the youngest brother, I was just kind of soaking things up from my brothers and father. ... It all kind of goes back to my dad, trying to get him to laugh by relating a story. You get ripped off buying a car, and so you imitate the guy who ripped you off. That's kind of how we did it, and that's how we still do it."
Wilson got his break when James L. Brooks produced the oddball comedy "Bottle Rocket," co-starring Owen and directed by fellow Texan Wes Anderson. The Wilson brothers (Luke, Owen and the eldest, Andrew) and Anderson moved to Los Angeles in 1996 and lived together in a succession of chaotic houses for several years.
"You can reminisce about the good old days living together, but the truth is, it was kind of rough going," Wilson says, laughing. "You get this 'Lord of the Flies'-type thing to it where you just get brought down to your most base emotions."
Though the crash-pad lifestyle came to an end, Wilson says he and his brothers still live close by in the Santa Monica area and see each other almost every day.
Wilson will soon begin work on "Dallas," based on the TV series, playing affable Bobby Ewing opposite John Travolta's mendacious J.R. And in September, "Idiocracy" will be released. To hear Wilson tell it, the satire from Austin filmmaker Mike Judge ("Beavis and Butt-Head," "Office Space") promises a subversive worldview more akin to Wilson's quirky work in Anderson's character-driven pieces "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums."
"The Army chooses me and a prostitute to use for this experiment that goes wrong," Wilson says. "When I get thawed out 300 years later, society has just completely gone to hell. Everything's supersized, you have billboards on your shirt, you sit on a La-Z-Boy that's also a toilet so you never have to get up from watching TV. My brother Andrew plays a character named Beef Supreme."
"Idiocracy" may help Wilson break out of the sweet-boyfriend mold.
"A few years ago a lot of people were saying, 'Hey, you always play the nice boyfriend,' and I thought, I've had fun doing it, but I wouldn't want to be just known for doing that kind of thing," he says. "Just like a musician might play solo or with a band, or acoustic or electric, it's good for your mind to change your style and play different kinds of characters."
Battle of the exes
Hugh Hart
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Luke Wilson (left) hangs out with his brother Owen at the July 12 New York premiere of "My Super Ex-Girlfriend." Reuters photo by Eric Thayer
(07-23) 04:00 PDT Los Angeles -- Cameron Diaz, Sarah Jessica Parker, Drew Barrymore, Reese Witherspoon, Kate Hudson, Heather Graham and now Uma Thurman.
Confronted with the roll call of his leading ladies, Luke Wilson jokes, "I've had 'em all!" He's kidding. "On paper, I'm like Warren Beatty, but my own personal life tends to put things in perspective, more than I think I'd like for them to be."
Wilson's self-deprecating, laid-back charm has made him a fixture in romantic comedies ranging from "The Family Stone" to "Legally Blonde" and "Charlie's Angels." Sitting on a park bench overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, a few blocks from his home, Wilson squints into the horizon as he ponders his popularity with top-billed actresses.
"I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing," he says. "Sometimes I'll start thinking, wait a second, am I not threatening enough, that these women want to work with me? Does this mean, you know, they think there's no edge there: the meek boyfriend that'll do anything? I don't know how that's happened, but I've really had fun working with those actresses, and you do learn from all of them."
In "My Super Ex-Girlfriend," which opened this weekend, one week after older brother Owen's "You, Me and Dupree" hit theaters, Wilson plays Matt, a mild-mannered New York architect who falls for Thurman's G-Girl, who uses her superpowers to fly around the city catching evildoers and preventing catastrophes. Despite the wall-wrecking supersex, he breaks up with G-Girl, prompting the woman scorned to sling Matt's car into orbit, throw a live shark through his bedroom window and burn obscenities onto his forehead with her laser vision.
Wilson tries to keep the proceedings grounded in some semblance of reality.
"I just think it's more funny to react to that stuff as if it happened to me in real life by playing it straight and not feeling like you have to top it," he says. "It feels more comfortable to me, and I think it can be more funny, in a Bob Newhart kind of way."
That approach sets him apart from his more antic peers, namely Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn, with whom he starred in "Old School." Ivan Reitman, director of "My Super Ex-Girlfriend," who's famous for "Ghostbusters" and "Stripes," got to know Wilson when he produced the frat-pack comedy a few years ago.
"I thought Luke was sort of the glue that held 'Old School' together," Reitman says. "He's the kind of guy we all want as our friend, both men and women, because he's this all-American guy from the middle of the country who's comfortable in his own skin. Even though Uma has a spectacular, colorful role, the story's really told through Luke, and he gets to blow it out, comically speaking."
Long before Wilson became a fixture in high-concept studio comedies, he was honing his chops in Dallas, spurred by a family of cutups.
"As the youngest brother, I was just kind of soaking things up from my brothers and father. ... It all kind of goes back to my dad, trying to get him to laugh by relating a story. You get ripped off buying a car, and so you imitate the guy who ripped you off. That's kind of how we did it, and that's how we still do it."
Wilson got his break when James L. Brooks produced the oddball comedy "Bottle Rocket," co-starring Owen and directed by fellow Texan Wes Anderson. The Wilson brothers (Luke, Owen and the eldest, Andrew) and Anderson moved to Los Angeles in 1996 and lived together in a succession of chaotic houses for several years.
"You can reminisce about the good old days living together, but the truth is, it was kind of rough going," Wilson says, laughing. "You get this 'Lord of the Flies'-type thing to it where you just get brought down to your most base emotions."
Though the crash-pad lifestyle came to an end, Wilson says he and his brothers still live close by in the Santa Monica area and see each other almost every day.
Wilson will soon begin work on "Dallas," based on the TV series, playing affable Bobby Ewing opposite John Travolta's mendacious J.R. And in September, "Idiocracy" will be released. To hear Wilson tell it, the satire from Austin filmmaker Mike Judge ("Beavis and Butt-Head," "Office Space") promises a subversive worldview more akin to Wilson's quirky work in Anderson's character-driven pieces "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums."
"The Army chooses me and a prostitute to use for this experiment that goes wrong," Wilson says. "When I get thawed out 300 years later, society has just completely gone to hell. Everything's supersized, you have billboards on your shirt, you sit on a La-Z-Boy that's also a toilet so you never have to get up from watching TV. My brother Andrew plays a character named Beef Supreme."
"Idiocracy" may help Wilson break out of the sweet-boyfriend mold.
"A few years ago a lot of people were saying, 'Hey, you always play the nice boyfriend,' and I thought, I've had fun doing it, but I wouldn't want to be just known for doing that kind of thing," he says. "Just like a musician might play solo or with a band, or acoustic or electric, it's good for your mind to change your style and play different kinds of characters."