The three actors who inspired Luke Wilson the most: “People I grew up loving”
Although a lot of people know Luke Wilson from his films with Wes Anderson and for being the possibly slightly less famous brother of Owen Wilson, not that many people know that he is, in fact, a fully-fledged soothsayer, able to predict things 20 years in the future. How is this possible, I hear you ask? Well, because in 2006 he made a film called Idiocracy, that’s how.
Starring Wilson as a man who is put into suspended animation for five hundred years as an experiment, awakening to a world that has been completely taken over by stupidity, consumerism and an idiotic US President, Idiocracy has proved not just prescient, but almost a roadmap to the world we now inhabit.
Conceived by Mike Judge, the man behind Beavis and Butthead and the brilliant corporate workplace-skewering Office Space, it’s a film about society going backwards that should have served as a warning, but as we know all too well, outright greed supersedes warnings, no matter how important, every time.
Wilson, who is not an actor who gets a lot of lead roles, is superb as the man wandering through this materialistic, uber-dumbed-down wasteland with a mixture of staggered incomprehension and “Am I the only one seeing this?” energy. And there’s nothing inconceivable about a payment method these days in which a barcode is stamped onto your skin to allow you to purchase things more easily.
As mentioned, where Wilson has traditionally been at his best is in a supporting role, memorably in landmark movies like Rushmore and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. He’s known for a very laid-back style, offering the kind of normality that can bring empathy from the audience to a character.
And he isn’t one for going too deeply into the art of acting as a profession. But that doesn’t mean there are plenty of traditional leading men among his acting heroes, as he told Backstage, saying:
“I really love reading about other actors who do have a lot of craft. And it’s fun having worked with other actors who are thoughtful and methodical… There’s something about acting class that’s not right for me. But then the people I love – like Gene Hackman or Jack Nicholson or Nick Nolte – they all studied. I don’t know if I’m too shy or if I’d rather just kinda do it than talk about it.”
While it’s true to say that Wilson didn’t enrol in theatre studies as a youngster or tread the boards on Broadway like Hackman did in the 1960s, what he does have is 30 years of experience in making films of almost every genre imaginable from sci-fi to comedy to horror and his back catalogue is littered with lesser known gems like 2007’s Vacancy co-starring Kate Beckinsale.
Like Hackman, Jack Nicholson made a jump from military service to movies, starting as an animator, a writer and an actor before his first big break on 1970’s Easy Rider. Nolte joined the same Californian theatre venue as Hackman did, the Pasadena Playhouse, and travelled the country doing theatre before getting into TV and then movies in the ’70s.
Wilson, meanwhile, has recently jumped on board the Hollywood cowboy trend that’s seen big-budget productions both on streaming sites and cinema screens as part of Kevin Costner’s epic multi-part Western Horizon: An American Saga, which has been getting released over the last couple of years in stages. Set in the American Civil War era, it co-stars Sienna Miller and Avatar’s Sam Worthington and has so far seen two chapters released with a third on the way and a fourth in development. Wilson will also appear in the new Will Ferrell comedy series, Golf, and a movie with Heather Graham called Getting Rid of Matthew.
