The one successful audition of Owen Wilson’s career: “That was the only movie”
Gone are the days when comedy double acts would pull in crowds with their slapstick antics.
However, with a shot in the genre’s arm in the late 1990s and early 2000s, new partnerships beyond Laurel and Hardy began to emerge, where Will Ferrell and John C Reilly made quite the tandem, as did Seth Rogen and James Franco, but for one of the true great duos of the era, you have to look to Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson.
The pair are perhaps best known for playing warring supermodels in Zoolander, trading ‘Blue Steels’ to great effect. While they didn’t quite live up to the expectations set by Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul, when they were the chosen to reprise the title roles in Starsky & Hutch, the list goes on with the Night at the Museum and Meet the… franchies (the latter is set to make a return) as well as the Wes Anderson family dramedy, The Royal Tenenbaums, cementing their chops in a new era.
Speaking to AV Club while promoting Zoolander 2, another joint venture between him and the Severance director, Wilson cast his mind back to the very start of their illustrious relationship on the 1996 film The Cable Guy, where they first crossed paths and, as the “wow” man recalled, it was special for another reason too.
“I remember that was the only movie that I auditioned for that I got the part,” he said. “I didn’t know, obviously couldn’t know at the time, that would be the first of I don’t know how many movies that Ben and I worked on together.”
The Cable Guy is a comedy-horror in which Jim Carrey plays a psychopathic cable installer who becomes obsessed with one of his customers. Poor Steven, played by Matthew Broderick, has to put up with Carrey’s improper social advances, with one of his most unhinged acts being assaulting a man on a date with Steven’s ex-girlfriend, played by Leslie Mann. He beats the guy to within an inch of his life in an attempt to make his ‘friend’ happy, and, as a fun exercise, take a wild guess as to who the guy playing his unfortunate victim could be.
“There’s not much improvising to do, when you’re just getting beaten up by Jim Carrey,” Wilson said, “Maybe that’s why it wasn’t that much fun to do. But I think having maybe not having trained as an actor, but having a background as a writer, that is one thing that I’ve felt I can easily contribute in coming up with some lines that could be good.”
However, Wilson’s comedic breakthrough turned out to be something of a poisoned chalice, even given Carrey’s untouchable nature at the time, as The Cable Guy was nothing like the hit it should have been. Still, it turns out that the audition was more valuable than Wilson could have ever imagined, for it gave him a chance to work with Stiller, who directed the piece, and they worked together again on Meet the Parents just four years later, before solidifying their partnership the following year with Zoolander.
