Owen Wilson’s 20 best performances – ranked!
20. She’s Funny That Way (2014)
This was a late-period Peter Bogdanovich film, a screwball spin on Ernst Lubitsch, that had Imogen Poots as the golden-hearted sex worker trying to break into show business. She walks into an audition in front of a big-shot Broadway director and realises he is the man to whose Manhattan hotel room she had gone the night before. And that director is played by Owen Wilson, with that good-natured, halting Texas drawl which was to feature to some degree in all of his performances. He is a pretty bland nice guy here – a default mode he sometimes goes into a bit too easily.
19. The Big Bounce (2004)
Genre veteran and Roger Corman associate George Armitage (who made Grosse Pointe Blank) directed this aimless crime comedy from Elmore Leonard’s novel of the same name. Wilson takes the starring role, which in the previous adaptation of 1969 had belonged to Ryan O’Neal – and there are similarities between them, two eye-candy leading men who can so easily become opaque. Wilson is the Hawaii beach bum and grifter who gets mixed up in a series of capers orchestrated by various shady types, including Morgan Freeman’s dodgy judge. Here he is coasting.
