The ‘Hawk’ star tells PEOPLE about the lasting passion he shares with his older brothers that dates back to their childhood in Dallas
Credit: Eric Charbonneau/Apple TV+ via Getty; David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- Luke Wilson is the younger brother of Owen and Andrew Wilson, all of whom began working as actors in the ‘90s and first appeared onscreen together in 1996’s Bottle Rocket
- He tells PEOPLE about the lasting passion he shares with his older brothers that dates back to their childhood in Dallas
- “Dallas was a smaller town then, but it was a pillar of the city — and it still is,” Luke, who stars in Fanatics’ new Town Hall ad campaign, says of the town’s football team
Some things never change for the Wilson brothers.
Luke Wilson, younger brother to Owen and Andrew Wilson, grew up a die-hard Dallas Cowboys fan with his siblings. It’s safe to say that sports was a big deal in their household, and that still rings true.
“Last night, I’d gone by Owen’s house, and my brother Andrew was there. We started talking about football season starting in a couple of weeks,” Luke tells PEOPLE in an interview on Tuesday, Aug. 25 in support of his new role as Fanatics’ “Mayor of Fandom.”
He continues of his brothers, “Those guys get into— not an argument about the Dallas Cowboys, but it felt like a pleasantly heated discussion that ended with a bet being made for what each one thought the outcome of the season was going to be, the win-loss record.”
“It is so funny that here we are, all these years later, still Cowboys fans. I can just remember growing up and seeing kids like, ‘Wow, they got a Cowboys jersey, they got a Cowboys lunchbox, oh, this kid went to the game last night,’” Luke says. “Dallas was a smaller town then, but it was a pillar of the city — and it still is.”
Credit: Fanatics
His love for football in particular, which he evidently shares with his family, made him the perfect person to star in Fanatics’ new brand campaign for the upcoming NFL season.
The “Fanatics Town Hall” ad stars Luke, alongside NFL great Calvin Johnson and gymnast Livvy Dunne, and centers around fans’ powerful love of sports with the launch of FanCash, which can be earned and used across the brand on team merchandise, events and more.
On set, Luke, 54, says he was reminded of just how relevant sports can be in every kind of field. “It was really fun to be with Calvin Johnson and Baron Davis and Livvy Dunne. … I mean, I was talking to my mom later about it. I always feel like having played sports helps me in what I do in being an actor and being on set because you are a part of the team.”
“Sometimes when you can see someone who’s not blending in on a set or acting like there’s nobody else but them, I always say, ‘Well, I bet they didn’t play sports.’ [Sports shows you] that other people’s jobs are just as important as yours, if not more so, even though they’re quiet and working behind the scenes.”
Credit: Fanatics
A new father himself, that’s certainly one of the reasons why Luke says he hopes his daughter, whom he recently welcomed with girlfriend Kendall Yates, will play sports too. “Being outside, being active, I think, was always important. And now, especially with all the electronics and stuff like that, I think sports are great for kids, and I certainly want that for my child.”
He credits Johnson, Dunne and Davis’ athletic experience with how well things went on set. “The thing about the athletes is, doing these scenes, they all had really good timing and were really funny,” he says. “It’s just fun to work with them, because their timing is as good as any actor. They’re very cool customers, even though it’s not something that was necessarily what comes naturally to them.”
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He was particularly impressed by the retired NBA All-Star. “I was saying to Baron Davis, I was like, ‘Gosh, it’d be fun to do a movie together,’ just because we were laughing about stuff and we were doing this scene kind of in a buffet line, and he was scooping food onto my plate, and I was saying, ‘God, it’d be funny if when you do the mashed potatoes, you got a lot of it on my hand.’ Sometimes you pitch that even to an actor, and they might be like, ‘What? You want me to put it on your hand? Why? I don’t understand. Explain it to me.’ He immediately got it and was doing it and [had] perfect timing, which ties into who they are as athletes.”
“We did all kinds of different things,” Luke adds of the day on set. “[We] would do takes, like you do in a movie, and then they’d say, ‘Cut,’ and then you would be talking to people [around you], ‘Who’s your team?’ and ‘Who’s your team?’ It wound up just being a really fun day.”
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