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Mon 27 October 2025 5:00, UK
“I’m a huge Mark Twain fan. I think you can make the case that all modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn,” says Gil Pender, Owen Wilson’s scholastic yet naïve protagonist of Midnight in Paris.
Wilson may lend himself to the kind of campy rom-coms that annoy me personally, but I will always have a begrudging respect for him. Anyone with a longstanding creative partnership with Wes Anderson has earned as much. Wilson also happens to star in two of my all-time favourites: Cars and Midnight in Paris.
Woody Allen’s ‘Best Original Screenplay’ winner Midnight in Paris is also one of Wilson’s favourites of his own movies. It is a fundamentally literary picture, and a love letter to the lost generation. It follows Gil, an affluent screenwriter yearning to be a novelist, who is revisiting Paris with his snobbish finacée Inez (played by Rachel McAdams in a rare unlikable role). Annoyed by Inez’s “pseudo-intellectual” friends, Gil takes to wandering the city’s streets at night, and stumbles into a time-travel construct that takes him back to Paris of the 1920s.
While out in the streets of Paris, he runs across Tom Hiddleston as F Scott Fitzgerald, Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway, and Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein, among others. Hemingway is particularly enjoyable as he delivers elegiac run-on sentences and challenges people at random to boxing matches, and you think, “Sure, that’s how Ernest Hemingway talked in person”. Gil is starstruck upon meeting another literary idol in a bar, but offers his opinion when Mark Twain comes up, hence the above quote.
Ironically, Wilson also named The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as one of his five top books during an interview with Stack Magazine (via Radical Reads). “I love the part where Huck and Jim get separated on the raft,” says Wilson, a scene illustrative of the novel’s core themes. The actor continues to analyse a quote critical to the main dynamic, adding, “And when he [Jim] finds out Huck tricked him, he says that great things to Huck that’s just very powerful. He says, ‘I’m going to tell you what it means – it means this whole time when we were separated I was just so sad… and all you were thinking about was playing a trick on Jim.’”
Next up is The Sportswriter by Richard Ford, which could easily be seen as a kindred spirit to Gil, following a failed novelist trying to come to terms with personal tragedy. Wilson’s a fan, naming Ford’s novel among his favourites – right alongside Miracle in the Andes by Nando Parrado, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege by Antony Beevor, and The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. Clearly, the Royal Tenenbaums star has a soft spot for non-fiction too, having been “moved” by stories both uplifting and utterly harrowing.
His last pick, The Snow Leopard, is categorised as travel literature, as it is Matthiessen’s trek to the Dolpo region’s Tibetan plateau in the high Himalayas with naturalist George Schaller in search of the snow leopard. “There are books that I read in a day, which is just great,” says Wilson, “And then there are some that I enjoy so much I don’t want them to end, and it seems like almost every page has something that’s really meaningful on it, that I want to think about, to savour.”
It’s not a bad selection that demonstrates a taste for different genres, from the cornerstone classics to specific historical accounts. All any of us can do is survey as much art as possible to learn more about the human experience, and recommend the few that happen to really stick out to us.
Owen Wilson’s five favourite books:
- The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Miracle in the Andes by Nando Parrado
- Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege by Antony Beevor
- The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
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