Despite being scared for his first appearance on “Hot Ones,” Owen Wilson conquered the wings of death like a champion, all while traveling down memory lane to discuss his most famous and hardest film projects.
The actor’s recent project is “Stick,” a sports comedy television series on Apple TV+ that stars Wilson as Pryce Cahill, a washed-up professional golfer who gets a chance at redemption working as a golf club salesman and coach for a teen phenom.
“Success isn’t as funny as failure. So, I think golf offers a lot of that,” Wilson said when host Sean Evans asked him why the sport of golf is such a good vehicle for comedy. “My older brother was just talking to somebody he played golf with in Amsterdam last summer and they watched the first couple of episodes. The guy was saying [the show] really captures the despair of golf…There’s just something about [the sport] that you’re forever chasing. That sort of feeling lends itself to comedy.”
Elsewhere in his interview, Wilson reminisced on his first feature film, “Bottle Rocket,” which he wrote alongside Wes Anderson: “It’s always nice when somebody comes up and likes that one because that one was really kind of a tortured post-production process of not test-screening well and it seemed like it might not even come out…And then over the years, obviously, some people liked it. And then you could have something that was like a big movie at the time and you never hear one more word about it, just disappears.”
As for one of the hardest movies he’s ever made, Wilson awarded that title to “Armageddon.”
“I just remember ‘Armageddon,’ there was a lot of stuff of us being in the space suits and being on the asteroid,” he explained. “And these space suits that we had they were not that comfortable. That was just a long, long shoot doing that movie. And I died in it too, so I didn’t even have to do the last third of it.”
Wilson started to struggle after eating his eighth chicken wing, which was coated in Da Bomb, Beyond Insanity hot sauce. “If the title of my memoir was called ‘Just Wingin’ It,’ then this would be a chapter,” he said, referring to the sauce’s playful name.
“Woah. This one just keeps going,” Wilson said shortly after taking his first bite. While playing a game of “Name that Tagline” with Evans, Wilson struggled to contain his sniffling and sipped on his tall glass of milk until it was empty.
Towards the end of his interview, Wilson explained why he was always nervous around David Letterman.
“Well, it was like a teacher that you maybe really respected or really liked, and so that made you more sort of nervous,” he said. “Kind of like, you know, I remember sort of like learning to drive with my dad and I could feel his energy and I was like more likely to make a mistake.”
Watch the full episode below, via YouTube:
