AMERICAN EVERYMAN

Luke Wilson didn’t mean to be famous; he couldn’t really help it. His reassuring on-screen presence has always gone down easily. When he shows up in a movie it’s like somebody’s handing you a beer at a barbecue: Sure, of course you’ll take it.

With that idiosyncratic, Dallas beach bum twang—Luke’s is nylon-stringed to his brother Owen’s steel-stringed—and its shucksy stream of “goshes” and “no problems” and “aw, mans,” he was such a natural amateur first launched him, his brother, and Wes Anderson into orbit. “And I’m always surprised when it’s like, ‘Yeah, this guy, he didn’t even know how to play bass and we just started him playing bass.’ I basically feel like that’s what happened with me. I was in this little band and then suddenly I had to learn how to play.”