Owen Wilson

At sixteen he was thrown out of St. Mark's School in Dallas for cheating in a geometry exam, having taken the teacher's book to get the answers. From there he went to the New Mexico Military Institute and then to the University of Texas at Austin to read English, where a playwriting class put him next to a student called Wes Anderson. That meeting handed him his whole career.

Born on 18 November 1968 in Dallas, he is the middle of three brothers. His mother, Laura Cunningham Wilson, is a photographer; his father, Robert Andrew Wilson, worked in advertising and ran a local public television station until his death in 2017. Both brothers, Andrew and Luke Wilson, act too, and all three turn up in his first film.

'Bottle Rocket' and writing for Wes Anderson

Together they wrote a thirteen minute short, in black and white, called 'Bottle Rocket', with Owen and Luke in the leads. It screened at Sundance in 1994 and found its way to James L. Brooks, who found them the money to make a feature out of it.

The feature arrived in 1996 and nobody went. Its reputation took years to build: Martin Scorsese named it one of his favourite films of the nineties and it now sits in the Criterion collection. Brooks also gave Wilson an associate producer credit on As Good as It Gets.

Two more screenplays with Anderson followed. Rushmore (1998), on which he is also an executive producer, and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), which brought the pair an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and a BAFTA nomination as well. Wilson acts in that one too, as Eli Cash, the novelist next door with a drug habit, alongside Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston and Gwyneth Paltrow.

He has gone on acting for Anderson without writing another word with him: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, the coach's voice in Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch, where he plays a reporter touring the town on a bicycle.

A decade of box office

Comedy is what made him famous in the meantime. Michael Bay put him in Armageddon, and two parts in 2000 changed what he was paid: the rich, insufferably accomplished ex-fiancé of the hero's girlfriend in Meet the Parents, a character he has now played four times, and the talkative outlaw opposite Jackie Chan in Shanghai Noon.

With Ben Stiller he formed a double act that ran on its own steam. Hansel in Zoolander, Hutch in Starsky & Hutch and the tiny cowboy Jedediah in Night at the Museum. In a 2026 interview he said that last one is his own children's favourite.

Then came Wedding Crashers in 2005, with Vince Vaughn and Rachel McAdams, one of the decade's biggest comedy hits. After it came You, Me and Dupree, which he produced, and the shrewdest job of the lot, the voice of Lightning McQueen in Cars and its two sequels. He is still doing it twenty years on, the series Cars on the Road included.

On 26 August 2007 he was admitted to a hospital in Los Angeles. The press reported a suicide attempt, he asked for his privacy to be respected, and he gave no account of it then and has barely given one since. Three days later he left the shoot of Tropic Thunder, where Matthew McConaughey took over the role, and he was back at work the following year on Marley & Me.

In 2011 Woody Allen gave him the best dramatic part of his career: the screenwriter who keeps wandering into the 1920s in Midnight in Paris, with Marion Cotillard. It brought him his only Golden Globe nomination and remains Allen's highest grossing film. Three years later he shared the Robert Altman prize at the Independent Spirits with the cast of Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice.

Mobius, Pryce Cahill and television

Disney+ launched Loki in 2021 and Wilson became Mobius M. Mobius, the Time Variance Authority bureaucrat who interrogates Tom Hiddleston and ends up his friend. That part found him a new audience, an MTV award shared with Hiddleston and Sophia Di Martino, two seasons and an uncredited cameo in the post-credits scene of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

Golf gave him the other long television job: 'Stick', the Apple TV comedy he has starred in and executive produced since June 2025. Pryce Cahill is a washed up pro coaching a seventeen year old prodigy. Rhea Seehorn joins for the second season, which starts on 4 November 2026.

Film roles have carried on with no clear pattern to them. In Wonder he was the father of a boy with a facial difference, in Marry Me the maths teacher Jennifer Lopez marries on the spot after finding out her fiancé, Maluma, has cheated on her, and in Paint a public television painter with a perm and a therapist's voice, which he also executive produced.

Where things stand

This year has given him three films. Runner, a thriller by Scott Waugh with Alan Ritchson, opened in September; Rolling Loud is a comedy with Matt Rife about a father who sneaks his thirteen year old into a hip hop festival; and Focker In-Law, the fourth film in the Focker series, arrives on 25 November.

He has never married. His three children come from three different relationships: Robert Ford, born in January 2011, Finn, in January 2014, and Lyla, in October 2018. For someone who has made this many films about couples, he keeps his private life unusually quiet.

One detail from 'Stick' explains a fair amount. Wilson had never played golf, though his father and his brothers did. "My excuse was I was left-handed and there were only righty clubs around as a kid," he said. Learning the game in his fifties to play a golfer, he had his father's old line running in his head: that he really ought to take it up. The show, he says, brought him closer to his father.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Owen Wilson is The Cable Guy (1996); in all, 52 films and 2 TV shows over 30 years. They have worked as actor in 52, producer in 6 and writer in 2. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Loki (2021), with 325 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 23 titles. The person they have worked with most is Ben Stiller, on 14 films, among them Little Fockers and Night at the Museum 2.