A prep school dropout who co-wrote his way into indie cinema, then spent two decades proving that the guy everyone underestimates is the one who keeps getting hired.
At a glance
- Known for
- Wedding Crashers, the Cars franchise, Wes Anderson's early screenplays, and Lightning McQueen's voice
- Before fame
- Got expelled from a Dallas prep school for stealing his teacher's textbook
- Off-screen
- Has three children by three different women and has never been married
Rise to Fame
A stolen textbook got him kicked out of St. Mark's School of Texas in tenth grade. He met Wes Anderson at UT Austin, and they started writing together. Their short film Bottle Rocket screened at Sundance in 1993, where James L. Brooks liked it enough to finance a feature. The feature flopped commercially, but Martin Scorsese later called it one of his ten favorite films of the nineties.
The Anderson partnership produced Rushmore and then The Royal Tenenbaums, which earned them an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. But Wilson wasn't waiting around for arthouse credibility. He paired with Jackie Chan in Shanghai Noon, which grossed $99 million worldwide, making him a leading man in two very different genres. The writing got him taken seriously. The comedies got him paid.
In the Spotlight
His box office math is hard to argue with. Wedding Crashers pulled $288 million worldwide on a $40 million budget, the first R-rated comedy to cross $200 million domestically. The Meet the Parents franchise cleared over a billion across three films. He voiced Lightning McQueen across the entire Cars franchise, which generated roughly $1.4 billion at the box office. Disney reportedly still calls him for recordings twenty years later.
He played Mobius in Loki and earned fans who'd never touched Wedding Crashers. He's got Meet the Parents 4 set for late 2026 and an Apple TV+ series, Stick, already renewed for a second season. For a guy who reportedly once considered joining the Marines after his first movie tanked, the career has an almost absurd staying power.
Side Notes
The twice-broken nose happened before any cameras were involved. Once in a fight at school, once playing football. He's had two surgeries for functionality, not vanity. "Probably my nose wouldn't have been that great even if it hadn't been broken," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2001. The crooked nose became inseparable from the persona, the physical shorthand for a guy who looks like he just wandered in from somewhere more interesting.
His "wow" shows up in over half his films. It became an internet meme big enough that hundreds of people gathered in Melbourne to say it in unison. He's leaned into it, calling it an ode to his "committed" fanbase. Most actors would be annoyed. He treats it like a running bit with the audience, which is probably why it hasn't gotten old.