‘Machine Gun’ Owen Wilson’s idea of a good time?
NEW YORK – Owen Wilson – with his fractured nose, crooked smile, twinkly blue eyes and tousled blond hair – is every girl’s dream date and every guy’s ideal frat brother.
Just ask his co-stars in “How Do You Know,” the James L. Brooks romantic comedy in which the laidback Texas native plays a free-spirited, womanizing professional baseball player for the Washington Nationals. They got a unique sample of Wilson’s pixyish charm when they showed up in Washington, D.C. for shooting – literally!
Jack Nicholson, himself a notorious rounder in his day, said he was immediately taken aback by Wilson’s guileless playfulness.
“Well, I didn’t get to do any scenes with Owen, who kills me anyway,” said Nicholson during press interviews, “but the only contact that I had with him was that he called me up when I first got there and he said, ‘Hey, do you want to go out and shoot machine guns?’ I thought, ‘Oh, my God, all these guys think that I’m adventurous.’”
Witherspoon chimed in, “He invited me, too. It’s kind of awesome.”
“The man is charming,” Nicholson said with a rascally shrug of his shoulders.
Wilson, sitting nearby with a Cheshire cat’s grin on his face, confirmed the story.
“I actually did (go out shooting machine guns),” he said. “It was like a friend knew somebody at one of the embassies that had a tennis court. And then when they let us on to play tennis, we found out that they had a machine gun range underneath the embassy, and they took us to shoot on it.”
- Dennis King
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