Continued from page 2

Owen Wilson: What Happened?

Originally posted Thursday August 30, 2007 12:00 PM EDT

"It's pretty cool that the people I enjoy being with the most also happen to be my brothers," Andrew Wilson (left, with Owen and Luke in May) told PEOPLE in March 2005. Photo by: Jeff Vespa / WireImage

Then one day, when she walked into a nearby church, "I looked over and saw Owen kneeling on the floor." Some 30 movies later, Wilson still fears failure. "People can't understand the pressures," says Platt. "Agents telling you to do this movie or that, people treating you differently, you don't know who your friends are." Adds another friend: "Owen is fun, kind and caring. [But] it's like he has a little John Belushi in him. He has demons; on some level, he's managed them for years."

Sometimes, however, Wilson could no longer keep them in check. According to a source who has been close to Wilson for many years, the actor has ventured into "the hard stuff" in the past, and he was in rehab clinics at least twice – once at Promises, once at Hazelden – in the past decade. (Reports that Woody Harrelson recently staged an intervention are denied by Harrelson's rep.) Of course, Wilson's laid-back stoner gaze is as much a part of his image as his off-kilter smile, and the actor has always played it up to the public, whether joking about buying Clear Eyes at 7-Eleven in high school or acting so loopy on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last year that Stewart asked him, "How high are you"? Wilson simply grinned.

No one who knows Wilson has ever claimed he is a choir boy. Growing up an Irish Catholic in then mostly Protestant Dallas, he was proud of his intellectual parents – Robert managed the local PBS station, and Laura is an accomplished photographer – but he also felt the outsider. Though a gifted writer, he was not a stellar student. As a 10th grader at St. Mark's prep school in Dallas, he stole his geometry teacher's textbook and copied out answers to an exam. After he was caught, Wilson was expelled. He agreed to go to the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell at the behest of his parents, and learned "to follow the rules there," he told The Australian Magazine in 2005. Then again, rules were made to be broken: In May Owen was a no-show at a New York Times panel appearance with his brothers in Manhattan. Asked about Owen's absence, Luke playfully answered, "He's under the weather, but . . ." Then Andrew chimed in, joking, "Elizabeth Taylor called it exhaustion."