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Owen Wilson's Cool Enough to Bring Insecurities to 'I-Spy' Role - The Morning Call, October 26, 2002

By Amy Longsdorf BEVERLY HILLS | Owen Wilson is rhapsodizing about his favorite Christmas tradition. ''We have this football game called the Snow Bowl because it never snows in Texas,'' says the 33-year-old Dallas native. ''It's just family and friends, and we throw the ball around outside in the front yard. We have a really good time. I look forward to it every year.''

It's not hard to picture Wilson, a mellow man with an easy laugh, romping around with his buddies. He's so good-natured that he often is cast as the goofy sidekick to action stars such as Jackie Chan and Bruce Willis.

But Wilson should not be underestimated. Since moving to Hollywood seven years ago, he has co-written ''Bottle Rocket,'' ''Rushmore'' and ''The Royal Tenenbaums.'' He was associate producer for ''As Good As It Gets.'' And he starred in movies as diverse as ''Behind Enemy Lines,'' ''Meet the Parents'' and the new ''I-Spy,'' with Eddie Murphy.

''The wonderful thing about Owen Wilson is that he manages to be dry, laconic and totally original, and yet he connects with mainstream audiences,'' notes ''I-Spy'' producer Jenno Topping. ''Next to Eddie, Owen is the funniest person on the planet.''

Wilson does something remarkable in ''I-Spy'': He turns the cliched role of a spy into a charming, hilarious, lovable creature with just the right amount of human insecurities.

Wilson improvised many of the movie's funniest moments, including a sequence that called for him to try to seduce co-star Famke Janssen by croaking a version of Marvin Gaye's ''Sexual Healing.''

''I'm more comfortable giving a character vulnerability or some type of insecurity,'' says the actor, who lives in Santa Monica with his brother Luke, 30. ''That's easier for me to relate to.''

Strangely enough, the Betty-Thomas-directed ''I-Spy'' has virtually nothing to do with the Bill Cosby/Robert Culp TV show of the same name. In the movie version, Wilson stars as an experienced secret agent who recruits a flamboyant boxer into the spy game.

''I didn't see 'I-Spy' as a kid,'' notes Wilson. ''I must have missed it. I still haven't watched a single episode, but people told me about it and it sounded like a funny setup.

''But in this case, had bought the rights to the name a long time ago, and they thought, 'If we paid all this cash, let's get our money's worth.' But our movie is a completely different thing.

''In fact, Eddie and I never had a single conversation about the TV series. But we did talk a lot about 'Uptown Saturday Night,' the Bill Cosby movie with Sidney Poitier. We both knew that movie backwards and forwards. That was more of an inspiration for us.''

In his beige jeans and untucked blue shirt, Wilson looks more like a starving graduate student than a white-hot actor. Sipping a cup of hot tea in his hotel suite, he goes out of his way to downplay his status as a rising star.

''Where I'm at, people are pretty nice when they recognize me,'' Wilson says. ''But it's nothing like what Bruce Willis or Eddie Murphy go through.''

As he's risen up the Hollywood ranks, Wilson has noticed how the fame game works. ''The first level is people saying, 'Did I go to school with you?' The second one is, 'You're on TV or in the movies, aren't you?' and you're supposed to almost audition for them and tell them which movies you've been in. That's awkward because you'll say a movie and inevitably they'll say, 'I saw that but I don't remember you in it,' which is the worst. That's the one you dread. And the third level is when people actually know your name. That gives you a little odd feeling.''

Wilson better get used to having odd feelings. He stars in February's ''Shanghai Knights,'' an action comedy that reteams him with Jackie Chan; ''The Big Bounce,'' an Elmore Leonard adaptation co-starring Morgan Freeman, and ''Starsky and Hutch,'' a TV-to-movie transfer with Ben Stiller.

''I remember 'Starsky & Hutch' as being a really cool show, kind of like 'Miami Vice,''' says Wilson. ''But 'Starsky & Hutch' had the best cars, and a lot of humor, too.''

Like his buddy Ben Stiller, with whom he's worked on ''The Cable Guy,'' ''Permanent Midnight,'' ''Zoolander,'' ''Meet the Parents'' and ''The Royal Tennenbaums,'' Wilson is more than an actor-for-hire. Before he graduated to name-above-the-title status, Wilson co-wrote a handful of movies with Wes Anderson that have gone on to become cult classics.

Their last collaboration, ''The Royal Tennenbaums,'' earned Wilson an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. So, is he an actor first and a writer second, or vice versa?

''Well,'' he drawls, ''the acting thing just sort of happened. It was like, 'Well, OK, I have a chance to do this.' But, hopefully, in the next couple of years, I'll write another movie with Wes. At the moment, Wes is writing something by himself for me and Bill Murray. It's going to be a father-son type thing. So that could be funny.''

Wilson, the son of a photographer-mother and a public-television-executive father, was a hellion growing up. After being thrown out of high school for getting his hands on a teacher's copy of an exam, he was shipped off to a military academy.

He was at the University of Texas in Austin half-heartedly pursuing a degree in English literature when he met fellow student and movie enthusiast Anderson. After comparing notes on their favorite directors — Cassavetes, Peckinpah, Scorsese and Altman — the instant pals vowed to write a movie of their own.

The result was ''Bottle Rocket,'' an offbeat comedy that detailed the adventures of disillusioned slackers who pursue a life of crime. Filmmaker James L. Brooks (''Broadcast News,'' ''Terms of Endearment'') got hold of the script and talked Columbia Pictures into giving Anderson and Wilson the $5 million they needed to complete the film.

Released with little fanfare, ''Bottle Rocket,'' which starred Owen, his younger brother, Luke, and older brother, Andrew, failed to take off at the box office. (It wound up earning less than $1 million.) But the film impressed executives at Disney, who bankrolled Wilson and Anderson's next two efforts — ''Rushmore'' and ''The Royal Tennenbaums.''

''Nobody saw 'Bottle Rocket' but we had supporters of the film in Hollywood,'' notes Wilson. ''Scorsese put it on his Top 10 list, which was kind of amazing for such a small movie. The idea that Luke and Wes and me have been able to do pretty well for ourselves is amazing to me, and it's all because of 'Bottle Rocket.'

''The truth is, as soon as I found out I could make movies for a living, it was the happiest day of my life.''

#2002 #interview

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frustratedcastingdirector · 7 years

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(Amusing stuff about Ruffalo popping the question, and all sorts of interesting tidbits. ;-) )

You can count on Mark Ruffalo in 'We Don't Live Here Anymore'

The Mercury (Pottstown, PA) - August 16, 2004

Author/Byline: Amy Longsdorf

Next to him, everyone else seems to be trying too hard. Let Tom Cruise swagger his way through movies and Brad Pitt turn on the golden boy charm. Ruffalo gets a lot of mileage out of just standing there, cocking his head and squinting.

It's no accident that Ruffalo's breakthrough role was playing Laura Linney's love-starved brother in "You Can Count On Me" or that he enjoyed his biggest commercial success as Jennifer Garner's shy, long-lost boyfriend in "13 Going on 30."

He's a real contender to replace Jeff Bridges as the thinking woman's sex symbol.

"I have nothing to do with being a sex symbol but I do practice all the time," Ruffalo said with a laugh. "We do, actually. Me and my wife, who I love and adore."

Lest he not be taken seriously, he quickly adds, "But, really, I want to be known as a good actor who respects the art form of acting."

No problem there, Mark. Not unlike Bridges, Ruffalo turns out to have a lot of talent underneath all that adorableness. He's the kind of good actor who attracts other good actors, as was the case with his latest film "We Don't Live Here Anymore." Once Ruffalo signed up, Naomi Watts came on aboard too.

It's not only Watts who counts herself as a Ruffalo fan. Listen to this endorsement from "13 Going on 30's" Garner: "I remember the second they breathed Mark's name as a possible co-star, I said, 'Please, please, please! Yes, yes, yes!'

"I've wanted to work with him for the last five years. And he turned out to be a dream of a person as well as a fantastic actor and a fun guy to hang out with. And talk about being grounded; he's really the bee's knees."

Ruffalo isn't exactly a household name but it's not for a lack of trying. In fact, it's been a little bit like the Mark Ruffalo Film Festival at the local multiplex. In February, he appeared in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" alongside Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey and Kirsten Dunst. A few weeks later, he popped up in "13 Going on 30." And now comes the one-two punch of "Collateral," which opened on Friday, and "We Don't Live Here Anymore," which debuts this coming weekend.

"I am in a lot of movies, " acknowledges Ruffalo, making it sound more like a curse than a blessing. "Now audiences can go, 'This guy again?' I just wonder when they're going to kick me out of Hollywood. You fight to get in for so long, and then they let you in for a little while, and then they kick you out. So now I'm worried about that."

By the looks of his resume, Ruffalo can rest easy. With both "We Don't Live Here Anymore" and Michael Mann's "Collateral," the actor is doing his part to avoid type-casting. In the former film, he plays Laura Dern's passive-aggressive professor husband who commits adultery with Watts, even though she happens to be married to one of his best friends (Peter Krause).

And in the later film, he's an L.A. cop hot on the trail of a hitman (Tom Cruise) who lures a taxi driver (Jamie Foxx) on a shooting spree. "Tom is the bad guy and I'm the good guy, which is a change," said Ruffalo. "But Tom's a charming bad guy. He's the bad guy that you love to hate."

After shooting a handful of intense movies, including "Collateral," Jane Campion's "In the Cut" and "My Life Without Me," Ruffalo was a little bit reluctant to participate in the emotional thrashing about that was required for "We Don't Live Here Anymore."

On the first pass, he turned the movie down. "It wasn't because I didn't like the material," he said during an interview in New York. "I was just afraid that no one could handle it in a mature way. Then Jane Campion called me and asked, 'Why are you not doing this?'"

At Campion's urging, Ruffalo took a look at "Praise," the first film by "We Don't Live Here Anymore" filmmaker John Curran. Blown away by Curran's work, Ruffalo agreed to meet the director.

"I saw how deeply he respected marriage and relationships," said the actor.

Ruffalo has a lot of respect for marriage too. This is a guy, after all, who wrote a script before popping the question to his future-wife, actress Sunrise Coigney, with whom he has a 3-year-old son, Keen.

"I only wrote out what I wanted to say because she'd turned me down the year before," he admits sheepishly. "I wasn't prepared the first time."

Indeed, during a camping trip to Big Sur, he proposed in such an awkward, halting manner, Coigney said no. "We almost didn't speak again for the whole rest of the trip," he said.

A year later, Ruffalo had a different plan of action. He intended on popping the question at a swanky restaurant in upstate New York. But on the way there, a torrential downpour nearly forced the couple off the road. They hit a deer. (The deer lived, he stresses when he's telling the story). And the posh restaurant turned out to be a dive.

"The whole night was a comedy of errors," he said.

Despite his bad luck, Coigney eventually accepted his proposal. "I put a blanket outside and was, like, 'Let's go look at the stars' and then I read this thing that I had written. And she said yes. Finally."

To hear Ruffalo tell it, he's always had a tough time with the opposite sex. Growing up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the son of a construction painter father and hairstylist mother, he said he never rolled with the popular crowd.

"I was pudgy," he said. "If I wore my bathing suit, I had a little roll. I was really awkward. I had no self-confidence. I was just this broken kid."

Moving with his parents to Virginia Beach and becoming a member of the wrestling team helped Ruffalo turn his luck around. But he wasn't out of the woods just yet.

"I started losing 10 pounds a year, like some idiot," he said. "I looked like a concentration camp survivor by the time I was 14. I literally walked around school, spitting in a cup to lose weight."

Ruffalo eventually retired the cup and took his newly-svelte self to Los Angeles where he studied acting at the Stella Adler Academy. For the next few years, he paid his dues starring in as many as 30 theater productions, many at the Orpheus Theatre Company, an establishment he co-founded.

In 1996, he gave off-Broadway a shot and made his New York debut in Kenneth Lonergan's "This Is Our Youth." A year or so later, Lonergan gave Ruffalo the role of a lifetime when he cast him as the wounded Terry Prescott in "You Can Count on Me." The movie earned co-star Laura Linney an Oscar nod but he was the one who walked away with dozens of offers.

In 2000, Ruffalo signed up for M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" as Mel Gibson's brother and was, seemingly, on his way to mainstream stardom. Then something terrible happened to him: He was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Forced to pull out of the film, Ruffalo underwent surgery and a year's worth of treatment.

"It wasn't life-threatening," insists the actor who, nonetheless, came out of the 10-hour operation suffering briefly from facial paralysis and memory lapses.

"I knew I was going to live. There's been some misrepresentation of that. And it's completely behind me now. I'm completely healthy. I'm just moving on with my life. But, yes, there was certainly, at the time, a lot of fear involved."

In retrospect, Ruffalo believes the illness came at a time when his life was speeding up too fast.

"I feel the illness was one of the greatest blessings that I've had," he said quietly. "It really gave me an in-depth understanding of myself and my strengths and weaknesses. It gave me a year with my son, who was a year old at the time. And it gave me a year to stand back and figure out what I really wanted from my career and my life. Things were getting out of control."

Now, Ruffalo regularly turns down work if it interferes with family responsibilities. In 2002, he passed on the coveted role of Brick opposite Ashley Judd in the revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

"That was tough but I made the decision based on my family life," he said. "I didn't want to be away from my son for six months. And my wife was opening a design store in L.A. If we couldn't come out to New York as a whole family, then I didn't want to come at all."

At the moment, Ruffalo is back in Los Angeles shooting an as-yet-untitled romantic comedy with Jennifer Aniston and Shirley MacLaine. Written and directed by Ted Griffin, who co-wrote "Matchstick Men," the plot involves Aniston finding out, on the even of her marriage to Ruffalo, that MacLaine might have been the inspiration for "The Graduate's" Mrs. Robinson.

After that, Ruffalo is up for anything. " I try to have an open door policy," he said. "I read scripts that people give me on the street. I guess I shouldn't say that. But I have a pile of scripts a mile high at my house. I know the best roles are in indie films.

"I just want to be able to look back at my career and say, 'I did everything I wanted to do and I didn't have to do anything that I didn't want to do.' That's what matters to me."

Memo: Mark Ruffalo may not be the richest, cutest or coolest actor in Hollywood but he's probably the most cuddly.

#mark ruffalo #marriage #brain tumor #cat on a hot tin roof #nearly passing on WDLHA #being overweight #13 going on 30 #open image in new tab

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