SUBMITTED BY Scooby
February 15, 2003 — Owen Wilson told The Olympian that the character we saw him play on screen in Shanghai Noon wasn't the character that was originally written:
"I started to ease into it a little bit more when I started working on the character with the writers," he says. "They were open to changing it and that made the character funnier to me. He was written as ... this cool cowboy who was able to shoot his initials in the door. But the character, as he became, couldn't have been further from that.
"Characters with insecurities, characters who have the seven deadly sins, those are always funnier people. A cool guy or a badass is not a funny character. Even when I was in 'Behind Enemy Lines,' I tried to make him a little funny. He was this tough, 'Top Gun' kind of character and that's fine for Tom Cruise -- I loved him in that movie. But I don't see myself playing a real badass."
Wilson has a note of awe in his voice as he describes watching Jackie Chan choreograph a fight scene from "Shanghai Knights" that incorporated umbrellas, until Chan transformed it into a brief, witty homage to "Singin' in the Rain."
"I remember seeing that movie with my mother," he says of the classic musical. "So to see Jackie show up on the set one day, pick up an umbrella and just do that was amazing. I can improvise dialogue, but Jackie does it with the action stuff."
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