BEVERLY HILLS -- Owen Wilson always thought he was the marrying kind, but then a little place called Hollywood intervened.

Wilson, 36, grew up in Texas where his mother is a photographer and his father an advertising executive.

He has two brothers, Andrew and Luke.

In 1996 the Wilson brothers teamed up with Owen's friend Wes Anderson to create a movie called Bottle Rocket which launched careers for all four of the young collaborators.

Owen left Dallas for Hollywood and the path he thought his life would take changed forever.

"I thought I'd be married and starting a family by the time I was 30. I envy people my age who are married with kids," says Wilson, who numbers Winona Ryder, Demi Moore, Gina Gershon and Sheryl Crow among his girlfriends.

After breaking up with Crow, he dated a Texas stripper named Carolina Cerisola.

"You can't grow up in Dallas and not date a few strippers. Dallas is the strip-bar capital of America," says Wilson.

He says he won't jump into marriage because, for him, "it has to be forever because I'm going to have a real church wedding."

"There's a side of me right now that says I should experiment and compare so that's what I'm doing."

Wilson says the most important attribute in a woman is "her ability not to make me cringe by what she says."

"I dated someone recently who said that babies come into this world knowing absolutely everything and that we make them forget by making them conform.

"I thought she was joking but she was dead serious, which pretty much ended the relationship."

For Wedding Crashers, which opens Friday, Wilson teams with Vince Vaughn to play a pair of womanizers whose favourite haunt is weddings.

They prey on the women who are caught up in the spirit of romance weddings symbolize.

Vaughn and Wilson have reputations as real-life Hollywood bad boys.

"If you're gonna be bad and grab life by the tail there's no better place to start than Hollywood. It's like an all-you-can-eat buffet for bad guys."

This is the paradise Wilson has been searching for.

"The first job I ever had was as a pool cleaner," he recalls.

"I took it because I thought I'd spend my days fending off lusty housewives.

"Sadly it never happened."

In Wedding Crashers, Wilson got to play out this fantasy.

When he is attending the wedding of a senator's daughter, the senator's wife propositions him and exposes her breasts to him.

The lusty housewife is played by Jane Seymour, best known as TV's Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman.

"It was absolutely surreal," recalls Wilson of the day Seymour did her nude scene.

"I couldn't wrap my head around the fact Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman was begging me to grope her.

"I was like an ll-year-old, all nervous and sweaty. She tried to take away my anxiety."

Vaughn insists he warned director David Dobkin the whole set up was a dangerous idea.

"I told David he should watch the Siegfried and Roy tape of the (tiger) attack.

"I knew we were just making a movie but asking Owen to grab Jane Seymour's breasts was akin to tying steaks all over your body and teasing the Dobermans at the junkyard."

Seymour insists she had to keep "encouraging Owen to touch me. He has these little ferret-paw hands and the closer they'd get to me the more they'd shake."

"It turned out to be an equally brave scene for the both of us."