Movie audiences love to laugh at Owen Wilson — as the excitement about the Zoolander sequel in which he’ll once again play obnoxious supermodel Hansel can attest.
The droll, laid-back Wilson is also known for the comedies he’s made with his former University of Texas roommate Wes Anderson — including earning an Oscar nomination for co-writing with Anderson the screenplay for The Royal Tenenbaums and with Ben Stiller on more than a dozen projects, including the Zoolander films.
But Wilson’s new film No Escape, which opens on Wednesday, is no laughing matter. In the thriller, Wilson plays Jack Dwyer, an American businessman who has taken a job with a company in a Southeast Asian country. Soon after, his wife, Annie (Lake Bell), and their two young daughters settle into a room at a local hotel in the country, and find themselves caught in the middle of a political uprising.
As the rebels begin a vicious, bloody killing spree, the quartet — with the help of a mysterious Englishman (Pierce Brosnan) — attempt to escape to nearby Vietnam.
No Escape marks the first dramatic action film the boyish 46-year-old Wilson has made since 2001’s Behind Enemy Lines. “It wasn’t a feeling I don’t want to do any more action,” Wilson noted in a recent interview in West Hollywood, where he was briefly joined by his rambunctious 18-month-old son, Finn. But Wilson, who also has a four-and-a-half-year-old son named Robert Ford, recalled receiving offers for roles for which he couldn’t envision himself as the character.
That wasn’t the case with No Escape, which seemed more grounded in everyday reality to him.
“When I read the script, it just seemed like an exciting story to me,” he said. “The big part of why it seemed liked a good story is the family element ... I could imagine myself playing a father who loves his family and because of that love will do anything to help.”
His father, Robert, was his inspiration for his role.
“We never went to Southeast Asia and found ourselves in the middle of a revolution,” he said. “But it can be stressful for parents taking kids to the state fair and one of them getting lost. That can panic a parent.”
Sadly, No Escape has a tragic timeliness. It’s being released less than two weeks after the deadly bombing in the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok, Thailand, that killed 20 and injured 120, many of them foreigners. Dealing with terror and political upheaval has become more commonplace for Western travellers and business workers similar to the events depicted in the film.
No Escape’s director, John Erick Dowdle, who wrote the script with his brother Drew, wanted an actor to play Jack who felt like he was “one of our friends in the scenario versus someone you’ve seen do this type of thing over and over and you are expecting them to do it. With Owen, there is a moment where you go, ‘I don’t know how he gets out of this.’”
Drew Dowdle said Wilson was attached for nearly three years to the film while the brothers obtained funding. “We had one instance that we were a day away from going to Thailand and the next day [the funding] imploded,” he said. “We said, we hope you stick it out and stay with us. He didn’t bat an eye. He said, ‘You find the money, and I’m there.’ It took us six months to rebuild [the funding].”
The film, which is being released by Weinstein Co., was shot in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand in late 2013.
Because he’s never taken acting lessons, Wilson worried about his emotional scenes with the two young actresses who play his daughters.
“It was a little like Marley & Me,” he said, referring to his movie about a couple’s close relationship to their dog. “In Marley & Me when at the end I am supposed to get very upset, I thought, ‘I hope I can do it.’ And then they bring in the old dog they cast just for this day. This dog walks in and you have a hard time not getting emotional when you see him.
“That is what it felt like doing these scenes with these little girls. You see their little faces looking up. They are acting, but they are trying hard and there is something moving about their effort.”
