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I got to know Owen Wilson a couple of years ago, when he was renting the second floor of a palazzo on the Piazza Farnese, in Rome. He stayed for six months while shooting the 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, directed by his friend Wes Anderson. I was living in Rome with my family then, and, as often happens with expatriates, one meets people one wouldn't ordinarily know at home. Through an emissary, Wilson invited me to one of his parties. We talked about books, sports, music, and magazines—everything, it seemed, except movies.

After that, I'd meet O. (as one comes to know Owen) in a pub called the Abbey Theatre—an Irish-themed joint near the Piazza Navona that shows NFL football games. Being from Dallas, Wilson is a Cowboys fan. "Hey, I will see you at the Ab-bay," he'd drawl, and he would see me, too—before I spotted him, usually. He had learned from being famous to get his looks in early, before other people noticed him. In the face of rapidly growing celebrity—this was around the time Starsky & Hutch came out, but before Wedding Crashers—he seemed to be aggressively committed to remaining himself. The reason that he was so determined to be himself, I imagined, was that he always seems to be playing himself on-screen. If he stopped being Owen Wilson in real life, he wouldn't know how to be Owen Wilson in movies.

Like the characters he plays, Wilson projects an air of toasted insouciance, but it takes about two minutes to see he's actually anything but a slacker. He's well informed, sharp-eyed, and careful. He orders his hamburgers well done, and I never saw him drink anything except Coke or water, and then usually tap water. "I'll have taaaiiip watah," he'd say, in that voice, after the waitress offered him, with a flourish, acqua con oppure senza gazzz. He didn't learn Italian; he just spoke to the natives in pidgin Spanish—hola, amigo!—and the Italians seemed amused, because that's exactly what an Owen Wilson character would do. We didn't discuss politics too much—you never know with guys from Texas—but I got the feeling we were on the same side about most things. After spending an evening with O., I'd find myself drawing out my vowels—exploring, like a tongue probing a sore tooth, the previously untested ironic possibilities in diphthongs.

"Are you trying to sound Southern?" my wife would ask.

But it wasn't a Southern accent exactly, or even a regional one. Later, when I asked Wilson why he talked that way, he told me he had needed a lot of speech therapy as a child, because no one could understand him. That intonation and inflection were what he had come up with.

While we were in Rome, Wilson was negotiating to play Walter Mitty in a film based on Thurber's short story, which seemed like the perfect part for him, because to me Wilson was Walter Mitty. His good fortune was so farcically unlikely, and its benefits so vast—almost anything he wanted, he could have, usually for free—that the only way to understand it was as a daydream. Except O. wasn't going to have to wake up. Maybe that's why he didn't get the part in the end.