Exclusive: Owen Wilson Believes 'Stick' Is the Next Great Sports Comedy

I'll answer your first question right away. Yes, Owen Wilson took golf lessons to prepare for Stick, his new Apple TV+ comedy in which he plays a downtrodden former pro golfer. And your second: How good is he? Well, all three Wilson boys played the sport in various capacities growing up—dad was a serious golfer—but there were only right-handed clubs around, so the lefty Owen always felt left out.

After Wilson's training montage for Stick, he asked Luke, the youngest brother, for a round of 18—feeling like his secret level-up was the ultimate practical joke. "Sure enough, we go out there and I played really good," Wilson remembers. "And he was blown away. He was like, 'This was a Make-A-Wish day where I take this guy and let him stumble around. I gotta worry if he's chewing on his golf club or what the hell he's doing.' "

So, for the record, Owen Wilson's handicap equates to roughly: Enough to impress Luke.

In Stick, Peter Dager plays the Gen-Z golf phenom Santi Wheeler—who might not want the help Wilson’s Price Cahill is so kindly offering.

The series follows Wilson's Price Cahill a couple decades after his mysterious flameout in pro golf, when he's perma-sipping beers and futilely trying to save his marriage with Amber-Linn (Judy Greer). Just when hope feels entirely lost, a potential protégé enters the picture: Santi Wheeler (Peter Dager). Wheeler is a Gen-Z phenom who can absolutely mash the ball, but still has a ton to learn. Cahill fully believes he can take Wheeler to Scottie Scheffler-esque heights, but the kid doesn't take to mentorship so kindly. The rest of the cast includes Mariana Treviño, Lilli Kay, and Timothy Olyphant. Oh, and did I mention Marc Maron plays Cahill's grumpy, old caddie, Mitts? Maron as a grizzled caddie should be worth the price of admission alone.

You'll see Wilson's swing in all its glory when Stick debuts its first three episodes on June 4. Then, Apple will release the following seven episodes weekly, every Wednesday through July 23. In this exclusive preview of Stick for Esquire, stars Wilson and Dager—as well as creator Jason Keller and executive producer Ben Silverman—teed up the series that just might be the sports comedy of your wildest dreams.

Wilson’s Price Cahill has a complicated relationship with Judy Greer’s Amber-Linn—and let's just leave it at that for now.

During the COVID pandemic, Silverman (who was the executive producer on The Office) chatted with Keller (a writer whose bonafides include Ford v Ferrari) about coming up with the sort of feel-good show audiences desperately needed at the time. (Spoiler alert for the next five hellish years: We still need uplifting TV.) Keller was inspired by his dad's experiences as a pro athlete—his father is Ronald Keller, a former MLB pitcher—but he wanted to focus on golf, specifically, a sport where you can appear out of virtually thin air and rise to greatness.

"You can come out of nowhere and be a participant. There is no PGA draft. There is no collegiate runway," Silverman says. "There is no true path to arriving on the PGA Tour other than excellence in your play and the renewal of your qualifying card to get into the Tour. [There's the] possibility that you literally could come from the back of a muni range into a Tour event in the course of a summer if you play your way there."

Marc Maron plays Cahill’s old caddie, Mitts—and Maron as a retired caddie should be worth the price of admission alone.

But every Hollywood-made sports story needs their star athlete, and for Keller, it was Price Cahill. "The idea of a character like Price had been bouncing around in my head for a long time," Keller says. "This sort of beautiful loser, or incredibly talented person that never lived up to his potential." Cahill feels like Happy Gilmore, The Dude, and a classic Owen Wilson character all rolled into one—so it shouldn't surprise you to learn that the 56-year-old actor topped Silverman and Keller's list for the role. "When I first started talking to him about the show and the character, very quickly I started to understand that the character of Price was being taken over by Owen Wilson and inhabited by the guy," Keller adds.

Inhabited is certainly an understatement. Just take a look at the photos accompanying this story—doesn't it feel like Wilson has played Price Cahill for years? Over the course of the series, Wilson flexes just about every muscle we've seen from his legendary film career; we see Cahill go from hard-on-his-luck, to relentlessly optimistic, to remarkably emotional, all in the course of Stick's short, roughly half-hour-long episodes. "I've been a fan of his forever and he's certainly done some emotional work," Keller says. "But in this show I just saw him just access some really powerful places. I'm just blown away by the guy as an actor."

Santi’s mom, Elena (Mariana Treviño), is her son’s biggest champion—which every child of a helicopter parent should know is both a blessing and a curse.

For Wilson, playing Cahill was a chance to channel some Zen, kung-fu-esque sports wisdom he finds deeply real. During our talk, he cites Johan Cruyff, the legendary football manager who would utter hilarious truisms like, "As long as we've got the ball, they're never going to score."

"Luke had told me about hearing somebody in a tournament yelling out [nonsensically], which sounds almost like you're talking to the universe," Wilson says. "I like that idea of Bryce feeling that way about this game. Because a lot of times these games that we play become metaphors for life."

If golf is a metaphor for life, then what sort of off-the-green issues does Stick have on its mind? Well, the series is deeply interested in parenthood. Found families are on the table as well, including what constitutes common ground—if any—between older and younger generations today. If Keller wrote Ford v Ferrari, then Stick oftentimes doubles as Gen Z v Gen X. Early and hilariously often, Cahill and Mitts battle Santi and his new friend, Zero (Lilli Kay)—a gender-fluid character who goes by she/them pronouns. A roamer by nature, Zero takes a special joy in reminding Cahill that toxic mentor-mentee relationships are, well... toxic. "Zero was as an opportunity for me to better understand Gen Z and challenge myself on what I thought I understood about that generation, and certainly that character of Zero being a gender-fluid character," Keller says.

Whenever Cahill’s golf lessons feel a little too icky, Zero (Lilli Kay) happily reminds him that the days of domineering coaches like Bill Belichick are long gone.

At this point, all you casual golfers and/or PGA hopefuls are surely wondering: Does Stick get the golf right? Well, Keller and Silverman confirmed that they had no interest in airing a sports comedy that skimps on the sport itself. "It was critically important from the first time we started talking about this show," Keller says. "We knew that we needed to get the golf right for golfers that were going to be watching our show. And we also knew that we needed the golf to work for the non-golfers."

Silverman adds that Stick even went so far as to pioneer a few tools that would help bring Stick's many golf scenes to life. He says that the crew used a robot that could hit balls, as well as "drone balls" that could actually follow the ball in flight. Eagle-eyed fans of the sport will also notice cameos from real-life pros including Collin Morikawa, Keegan Bradley, Max Homa, and Wyndham Clark.

You can safely consider Stick as Santi Wheeler’s origin story—and we’ll surely find out whether or not he enjoys his sports-movie ending.

Owen Wilson and Marc Maron are definitively the names on Stick's hypothetical movie poster, but you could argue that relative newcomer Peter Dager (Insidious: The Red Door) is the beating heart of the show. The teenage Wheeler is temperamental, wise beyond his years, and damn good at hitting fairways. Stick is not only Wheeler's origin story as a potential golf superstar, but it's his coming-of-age story—which includes forging a bond with Cahill that he didn't see coming. "It's such a luxury doing original material that was created by a great writer—who really cares about the material—in this sort of, like, day and age where a lot of the stuff that is being made is recycled material," Dager says.

And just from talking to Dager for a short time, it's clear that he and Wilson enjoyed a teacher-student dynamic off-set, too. "He's such a writer at heart," Dager says. "I learned a lot from him without him saying anything."

Apple TV+'s last feel-good, sports-comedy hit—a little show called Ted Lasso—premiered during the pandemic, in a dark-as-heck time when everybody needed some warmth. It's not too much of a stretch to think that Stick could similarly provide a little bit of that magic in another unprecedentedly chaotic year. After all, Stick also employs a leading man that is perfectly capable of generating laughs and tears on command.

"My hope for this show is that people relate to the characters in a very real way, and they see this found family struggling to get along in a way that they can relate to," Keller says. "It's pretty cynical out there. There's certainly a lot of cynical TV—and the news is rough, no matter what side of the news cycle you're on. My hope is that this is a place where people can connect to characters and feel something, but ultimately feel good about what they've watched."