The story of O

By John Seabrook

updated 6:07 p.m. ET Sept. 27, 2007

I got to know Owen Wilson a couple of years ago, when he was renting the second floor of a palazzo on the Piazza Farnese, in Rome. He stayed for six months while shooting the 2004 film “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” directed by his friend Wes Anderson. I was living in Rome with my family then, and, as often happens with expatriates, one meets people one wouldn’t ordinarily know at home. Through an emissary, Wilson invited me to one of his parties. We talked about books, sports, music, and magazines — everything, it seemed, except movies.

After that, I’d meet O. (as one comes to know Owen) in a pub called the Abbey Theatre — an Irish-themed joint near the Piazza Navona that shows NFL football games. Being from Dallas, Wilson is a Cowboys fan. “Hey, I will see you at the Ab-bay,” he’d drawl, and he would see me, too — before I spotted him, usually. He had learned from being famous to get his looks in early, before other people noticed him. In the face of rapidly growing celebrity — this was around the time “Starsky & Hutch” came out, but before “Wedding Crashers” — he seemed to be aggressively committed to remaining himself. The reason that he was so determined to be himself, I imagined, was that he always seems to be playing himself on-screen. If he stopped being Owen Wilson in real life, he wouldn’t know how to be Owen Wilson in movies.

Like the characters he plays, Wilson projects an air of toasted insouciance, but it takes about two minutes to see he’s actually anything but a slacker. He’s well informed, sharp-eyed, and careful. He orders his hamburgers well done, and I never saw him drink anything except Coke or water, and then usually tap water. “I’ll have taaaiiip watah,” he’d say, in that voice, after the waitress offered him, with a flourish, acqua con oppure senza gazzz. He didn’t learn Italian; he just spoke to the natives in pidgin Spanish — Hola, amigo! — and the Italians seemed amused, because that’s exactly what an Owen Wilson character would do. After spending an evening with O., I’d find myself drawing out my vowels — exploring, like a tongue probing a sore tooth, the previously untested ironic possibilities in diphthongs.

“Are you trying to sound Southern?” my wife would ask.

But it wasn’t a Southern accent exactly, or even a regional one. Later, when I asked Wilson why he talked that way, he told me he had needed a lot of speech therapy as a child, because no one could understand him. That intonation and inflection were what he had come up with.

Another Walter Mitty
While we were in Rome, Wilson was negotiating to play Walter Mitty in a film based on Thurber’s short story, which seemed like the perfect part for him, because to me Wilson was Walter Mitty. His good fortune was so farcically unlikely, and its benefits so vast — almost anything he wanted, he could have, usually for free — that the only way to understand it was as a daydream. Except O. — it seemed then — wasn’t going to have to wake up.

Slideshow   Owen Wilson From action to comedy to a mix of both, a look at the films of the Hollywood favorite. more photos

Last June, Wilson was staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York while Anderson was editing his new film, “The Darjeeling Limited,” which stars Wilson and is due out Sept. 28. As I was waiting for Wilson in the lobby of the hotel, I heard that voice, slightly hoarse and low: “Hey, buddy.” He was wearing jeans, a blue T-shirt, and black sneakers. He did not seem to have lost his determination to remain Owen Wilson. On the night after we met, as I later read in the New York Post, he rode a mountain bike up to Scores West Side, a strip club in Chelsea, checked it at the club, spent a couple of hours getting lap dances (I wondered if he likes strip clubs because it’s the only place where people aren’t staring at him), and left his bike at the club while he went to some other nightspots.

We found a quiet place to talk. It was a small room with a big-screen TV, muted, tuned to CNN. Wilson sat with his back to the screen, on which, by a weird coincidence, almost as soon as we began talking about being a celebrity, the whole Paris Hilton re-arrest scene started going down in real time — the overhead helicopter shots of the photographers running after the car. In front of that image was Owen Wilson’s head, saying he thinks his fame is still manageable, that there’s still another level of celebrity that he hasn’t reached, when you have to take precautions.

“You mean that level,” I said, and we watched pictures of Paris’s tearful face in the patrol car. Wilson said he felt bad for her. But I got the sense then that if his career were to take him to that level, he wouldn’t regret it.

Wilson’s BlackBerry chirped. It was Anderson.

“Hey, Wes ... OK, can you text it to me, or is it easier to tell me?... Yeah, yeah, OK ... Second Street, just east of Bowery ... I’ll go.”

After hanging up, Wilson asked if I wanted to go downtown to see some drawings by Hugo Guinness, a British artist whose work can be seen on the walls of the house on Archer Avenue in Anderson’s 2001 movie, “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

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