Owen Wilson Admits His Superhero Knowledge Mostly Involves Some Very On-Point Thoughts On… Aquaman?

During a new cover profile for Esquire that’s packed to the brim with that effortless Owen Wilson charm, the Loki actor opened up about his first time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and whether it’s true that he really knew nothing about the the vast comic-book movie franchise before joining the Disney+ series. In a word… yeah.

In an entertaining exchange, Wilson shares that he just came from a press junket from Loki, and there always seems to be something in the “press notes” is that “I know zero about the MCU.” While discussing that narrative, he eventually came clean about the extent of his superhero film knowledge, and it’s mostly about Aquaman, who isn’t even a Marvel character. Via Esquire:

“I don’t know a ton about it, but I know—”

He pauses.

“Actually, yeah, I probably don’t know that much about it. I kind of know about Iron Man. I’ve seen Aquaman. He’s swimming in jeans. No one can swim in jeans! That was my argument with the kids about Aquaman.”

However, while Wilson is upfront that he knows very little about the MCU, he did thoroughly shoot down the notion that he had to be “convinced” to star in Loki. He told Esquire that it was a simple matter of director Kate Herron calling him, pitching the story, and Wilson wanting in.

As Mobius, he did have a lot of heavy exposition to deliver in a universe that Wilson wasn’t entirely familiar with and was about to get way more complicated by the finale. Yet when asked about the his dialog in an interview back in June, he was once again cool as can be about it.

“You’re describing this to me and I don’t really have much of a memory of it, so I don’t know if I blocked it out of my mind the way you would math class,” Wilson told Variety. “Because it is complicated, and it’s hard sometimes if you feel you’re saddled with a lot of exposition. I don’t quite remember it being too burdensome. We must have found a nice flow for it, where it was able to naturally work its way in to the conversations with Tom. Because I don’t remember it being too, ‘Oh god, now we’ve got to lay this out.'”