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Luke Wilson leaps into the world of superheroes with DC’s Stargirl

DC’s Stargirl sees Luke Wilson play a role literally made for him: the live-action version of the comic book character he inspired.

Luke Wilson and Brec Bassinger in Stargirl
Luke Wilson and Brec Bassinger in Stargirl

They had come tumbling in from the vast plains of Texas, eager as puppies and twice as cute. It was 1996, pop culture belonged to the slacker generation, and Luke Wilson and his brother Owen, together with university pal Wes Anderson, had just hit Hollywood with their debut feature, Bottle Rocket.

Despite being a commercial flop, the micro-budget crime caper carved a permanent place in the hearts of Gen Xers, launched a slew of indie film tropes and won praise from Martin Scorsese as one of the top films of the 90s.

Watching from the sidelines was Geoff Johns, a young writer and filmmaker new to LA, who would go on to write stories starring Superman, Green Lantern and The Flash and eventually head up comic-book powerhouse DC Entertainment.

Johns saw Bottle Rocket and was so taken with Luke Wilson as an actor, with his dry humour and guileless likability, that he based a character on him: Pat Dugan, the “aw-shucks” superhero sidekick of his first comic-book series, Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E.

Fast-forward more than two decades and Johns is creator and showrunner on a new TV series called Stargirl, based on that first DC comic. And, in a nice full-circle moment, Wilson is now playing a role literally made for him: the live-action version of the comic book character he inspired.

“Yeah, that’s what Geoff told me, that he’d written the part for me,” Wilson says in his distinctive Texas-inflected drawl. “So that was kind of fun, the fact he’d tailor-made it for me.

“We both came to LA at the same time; he came out from Chicago with his friends and I came out from Texas with my brothers and friends, so we had these similar paths. We felt like we were contemporaries.”

Wilson, 48, is beaming in via video call from his light and airy LA home, where he’s engaged in a battle familiar to many a middle-aged semi-Luddite: wrestling a new video-chat app to the mat. “No, I can’t switch services,” he stage-whispers to someone off screen as the connection glitches and his face freezes in an entertaining series of poses: bemusement, confusion, alarm. “I’ve just barely got this set up …”

Wilson admits to feeling equally unmoored in the extended DC Universe, a fictional arena vaster than Texas, home to hundreds of heroes and villains, with all their attendant backstories and intersecting narratives.

Luke Wilson is now playing a role literally made for him
Luke Wilson is now playing a role literally made for him

“In between the Justice Society and the Injustice Society and the Seven Soldiers of Victory and Johnny Thunder and Hawkman and Hawkgirl … I’d get lost in some of these speeches,” he admits. Growing up, he was more of a Mad magazine kid.

But in this golden age of comic-book franchises, every self-respecting Hollywood actor, from Robert Downey Jr to Anthony Hopkins, has at least one superhero role on his resume. Time to step up. “I feel like I’ve done kind of every genre from romantic comedies to dramas to westerns to playing a policeman, a lawyer, so it just seemed like something new and different,” Wilson says. Besides, he thinks Johns is a guru. “I’ve always liked someone who is really well-versed in, you know, a sports game or music, and he just knew so much about comic books. He’s an authority on superheroes.

“You’re like, ‘OK I want to stump this guy’ so I’d ask him, ‘Where did this person come from and where did they get their superpowers?’ But he’d always have the answer. I would kid around and compare him to the guy who designs all the characters in Blade Runner — that was Geoff, the man behind the curtain.”

Following Bottle Rocket, Owen Wilson and director Anderson went on to co-write Rushmore and the Oscar-nominated The Royal Tenenbaums. Luke starred in both. Upon making Old School in 2003, he became a fringe member of the so-called Frat Pack, a loose comedy collective that, along with Zoolander and Wedding Crashers star Owen, included Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller. He also appeared as the good-guy love interest in a number of romantic comedies, most notably Legally Blonde and its sequel.

As a kid growing up in Dallas, Luke grew used to tagging along with his two older brothers, Owen and Andrew, also an actor. So he’s supremely comfortable with where he finds his star in the Hollywood firmament: not a sidekick exactly but a winsome foil, a good-natured character actor reacting to comedic chaos. The pressure attached to Owen’s A-list status freaks him out.

“Someone like Luke who has been in the industry for as long as he has and done the projects he’s done, a lot of times they get that diva, jaded attitude but Luke is the most humble person,” says Brec Bassinger, the 21-year-old Texan actress who plays Stargirl in the family-friendly DC series.

Johns’ original comic was informed by the Star-Spangled Comics of the 1940s, which featured a child hero and adult sidekick. The inspiration for the character of Stargirl was personal: Johns modelled her on his younger sister, Courtney, who died in the explosion of TWA flight 800 off New York’s Long Island in 1996. “I felt so honoured that he trusted me with his passion project,” Bassinger says.

Brec Bassinger, the 21-year-old Texan actress who plays Stargirl in the family-friendly DC series.
Brec Bassinger, the 21-year-old Texan actress who plays Stargirl in the family-friendly DC series.

We first meet Stargirl’s alter-ego, a high-schooler named Courtney Whitmore, sulking in her basement. She’s less than enthused about her recent relocation from Los Angeles to small-town Nebraska with her mother (Amy Smart) and new stepdad, Pat (Wilson). Pat was formerly known as Stripesy, sidekick to Justice Society of America superhero Starman, who was killed years before as part of a purge by the nefarious Injustice Society. Courtney stumbles upon her stepdad’s secret and also discovers a gravity-defying gizmo called a Cosmic Staff which unlocks her own superpowers. Soon the odd couple are fighting crime with the help of a giant robot Pat has cobbled together from refurbished car parts.

This is where Wilson’s suspension of disbelief falters. “I don’t know, because I’m not handy at all,” he says. “People who know me get a kick out of this character based on me being a genius mechanic because, you know, I can hardly unscrew a light bulb.”

As comic-book movies get darker (The Dark Knight), weirder (Joker) and zanier (Thor: Ragnarok), Stargirl emerges as the Goldilocks of superhero shows, neither frivolous nor grim but somewhere in between. Wilson brings charm and wry humour to the well-meaning stepdad who finds himself in the ignominious position of playing second-fiddle to a teenager.

Bassinger and the cohort of young actors playing Stargirl’s fellow high-schoolers are all aged in their 20s, not much older than Wilson was when he gambolled through Bottle Rocket way back when.

“Coming into it I thought, ‘I’m going to be able to teach these kids’,” he says. “‘I’m going to be like the elder statesman and they’re going to be able to learn a lot from me. I’ve been in the business 25 years.’”

But this new generation are no slackers. “I quickly learned I had to just try to keep up with them,” he says. “No kidding, they were all really impressive; total pros, always knew their dialogue, always on time. So if anything these kids made me buckle down.”

DC’s Stargirl launches on August 22 on BINGE.

Megan Lehmann
Megan LehmannFeature Writer

Megan Lehmann writes for The Weekend Australian Magazine. She got her start at The Courier-Mail in Brisbane before moving to New York to work at The New York Post. She was film critic for The Hollywood Reporter and her writing has also appeared in The Times of London, Newsweek and The Bulletin magazine. She has been a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and covered international film festivals including Cannes, Toronto, Tokyo, Sarajevo and Tribeca.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/luke-wilson-leaps-into-the-world-of-superheroes-with-dcs-stargirl/news-story/9cc5fbfc7114af0b8d8a72183922b581