It’s impossible to watch Paint — writer-director Brit McAdams’s new indie comedy about a Vermont artist named Carl Nargle (Owen Wilson) whose calming PBS tutorials on painting natural landscapes have turned him into a local legend — without thinking about real-life PBS sensation Bob Ross.
They share too much in common, from Ross’s bushy ’do and his transfixing voice to his famous visual odes to nature and even the network that made him an icon.
“He was very much [an inspiration] to Brit, probably, when he was writing it,” Wilson, 54, tells Yahoo Entertainment in a new interview. “I grew up in the late-’70s and early-’80s, and this is a look, that Bob Ross had — and also [singer] Gordon Lightfoot — that you would see back then. And it was a fun character to play. And also playing a character who is kind of stuck in his own time, I thought that was kind of funny. Somebody was just committed to the way they look, and they don't need to change anything cause everything's working, until it's not.”
This isn’t a biopic, though, and Wilson isn’t playing Ross — he’s clear about that. His character Carl Nargle is a megalomaniacal womanizer who’s had romantic trysts with every woman at his station, though his heart belongs to the one who got away (Michaela Watkins’ Katherine). He rules Burlington, Vt. — until a young painter (Ciara Renée) arrives at station and steals his limelight.
Still, Paint is enough of an homage to the Joy of Painting star — who died in 1995 but has lived on in internet infamy ever since — that Wilson admits he studied the late Ross for his performance.
“Yeah, I did. Brit hadn't mentioned anything about doing [an impression], thankfully, cause that probably would've made me more nervous cause I'm not good at doing voices and things. But I did watch some of the shows and his dialogue is so good. It's just kind of the way he spoke. You can see why he has endured, because there is a really nice quality that comes through him and those shows that makes you kind of feel good afterwards.”
The Wedding Crashers, Royal Tenenbaums and Loki star admits he’s not much of a painter himself, though he did have one moment of artistic glory as a child.
“There was one [drawing] that I worked on, sort of my masterpiece of as a kid, of the Lone Ranger fighting against some army men,” says Wilson, who grew up as one of three sons in Dallas. “I worked on it for a long time… but I got right to the end and messed up on his boot and got so discouraged that I didn't want to finish it. My mom had to pay me to finish it, and then she got it framed and it's now still up in my mom's room. So there's kind of some pride in that.
“But [when] my mom had it and she took it to get framed, she said that somebody tried to buy it from her. And that was just incredible to me as a kid. Somebody was trying to pay for this thing that I did.”
Paint is now playing.
Watch the trailer:
