Owen Wilson Meet the Parents (2000)
Owen Wilson was thirty-two when Meet the Parents opened and arrived at the Kevin Rawley role from inside the Wes Anderson and Stiller orbits — Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998) as co-writer and supporting actor, The Cable Guy (1996) and Permanent Midnight (1998) opposite Stiller, Anaconda (1997) and Armageddon (1998) as a working studio supporting player, and Shanghai Noon (2000) earlier the same year as the breakout co-lead opposite Jackie Chan.
Wilson came to the role through Stiller
Wilson and Stiller had appeared together in The Cable Guy and Permanent Midnight and had developed an off-camera friendship through the New York and Los Angeles comedy circuits. The Kevin Rawley role — wealthy ex-fiancé, ostentatiously Zen Wall Street trader who sculpts in his spare time — was an addition to the Glienna short's premise (Kevin does not exist in the original) and was developed late in the script process.
"Owen was Ben's idea. We had Kevin written as someone who was just a rival, and Owen turned him into something funnier — that California-Zen guy who has too much money and somehow you cannot dislike him. The whole movie shifted when he showed up." — Jay Roach, Vulture (2020)
What Kevin is doing structurally
Kevin's structural function is to be the man Greg cannot compete with on any axis. He is wealthier (Wall Street trader), more physically competent (the hand-built altar, the volleyball spike, the hope chest he carved for Pam), more spiritually composed (the Zen rhetoric), and previously approved by Jack (the original engagement). Greg's competence-and-charm engine sputters every time Kevin enters a room. Wilson plays Kevin as a man with no aggression — he is genuinely happy that Greg has Pam, he gives Greg the tour, he opens his estate to the wedding — and the absence of malice is what makes him impossible to compete with.
"Wilson does the hardest thing in the movie. He plays the romantic rival without ever being a villain. Kevin is genuinely nice. Greg has nothing to push against. That is a much funnier setup than a jealous ex would have been." — Stephanie Zacharek, Salon archive (2000)
Wilson's career arc was already on the rise
The year 2000 was Wilson's commercial breakthrough — Shanghai Noon opened in May, Meet the Parents in October. The two films together established him as a wide-release studio leading man. The Wes Anderson collaborations had given him a literary and critical reputation; the studio films gave him a commercial one. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), which he co-wrote and starred in, would arrive a year later.
"I was lucky in 2000. I had a couple of things come out at the same time and people decided I was a movie star. I had been working for ten years and nobody noticed, and then suddenly everybody noticed." — Owen Wilson, GQ (2017)
Wilson and the Stiller-Wilson partnership
Wilson and Stiller would reunite repeatedly across the next decade — Zoolander (2001, directed by Stiller), Starsky & Hutch (2004), Night at the Museum (2006), The Watch (2012), Zoolander 2 (2016). The pairing — Stiller's tightly wound urban East Coast competence against Wilson's loose Texas-drawl Western humor — became one of the more reliable comic configurations of the 2000s. Meet the Parents was the first film to test the configuration in a supporting capacity, with both actors playing rivals rather than partners; it would become the template Stiller's directorial work returned to repeatedly.