Owen Wilson Talks Taking Bob Ross Art Classes for Paint

During a recent chat with Entertainment Weekly, star Owen Wilson discussed taking Bob Ross art classes for his role in Paint. The Brit McAdams-directed comedy film tells the story of a Bob Ross-esque artist named Carl Nargle, who hosts his own painting show and is considered a local celebrity in Vermont.

While talking to EW about his new film, Wilson reflected on visiting his father, a PBS TV executive, at his workplace. He said, “I remember as a kid, my mom taking us down to visit my dad and you’d see the cameras and cables and the hustle and bustle. There was something exciting about seeing that as a kid, and also seeing how small potatoes it was with the pledge drives and always trying to raise money.”

The actor noted that the station in Dallas where his father worked had versions of his Paint character. “Maybe not the hair, but the fashion that Carl is rocking was well represented there,” he stated.

In Paint, Wilson’s character starts to question himself after another painter is brought in to give new life to the station. Though Paint is a comedy, Wilson noted that “there’s nothing funny to Carl about what’s happening to him. It’s painful. I played that in the way I would imagine that would feel. We’ve all had experiences of feeling like you don’t fit in or being rejected.”

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Owen Wilson Said He and David Arquette “Worked on Some Paintings” Together

The Loki star noted that while prepping for his character, he took painting classes with Bob Ross instructors. He said, “My two boys joined in and we took a class,” he says. “And then David Arquette, actually, I went over to his house one day [and] he had even gone to Florida to take Bob Ross [Art Workshop classes]. We worked on some paintings.”

Wilson added that he did a decent job with his creations “I mean, they’re good enough to get hung up in my house, so that’s saying something.”

The Zoolander star continued, “You have to have a lot of trust in the people coming up with it and putting it on every day, that it would feel real for this character. Luckily, we got to a place where it did, but it was a struggle. Some of the early incarnations of Carl Nargle’s wig were wildly off base and would not have worked. One of the wigs, we were saying he looked like a keyboard player for a band from the ’80s that didn’t get many gigs out of town.”

Ross started his PBS program, The Joy of Painting, in the early ’80s. The show ended in the ’90s so the artist could focus on his health. Ross later died in 1995 from lymphoma. He was 52 years old at the time of his passing.

Wilson finished by talking about the lasting impact that Ross made. He said, “It’s just a quality that he had: that kind of encouraging, supportive quality you would hope to find in a good teacher. And also the act of painting, doing something creative: for human beings, that feels good.”