The Vince Vaughn who lives in my head is one of my favorite comedic actors. He’s the swaggering, charmingly sarcastic and cheerily ingratiating star of that great run of hit comedies from the early 2000s: “Old School,” “Dodgeball,” “Wedding Crashers,” “The Break-Up.” (His cameo in “Anchorman” and recurring role as Freddy Funkhouser on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” are also prime comedic Vaughniana.) And putting my own preferences aside, I’d argue that there’s a whole microgeneration of dudes who tried to swipe the neo-Rat Pack vibes that Vaughn was able to deploy so winningly in “Swingers.”
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In more recent years, though, after the often R-rated, kind of bro-y comedies with which Vaughn made his mark lost some of their cultural mojo, he has focused more on dramatic roles: the highly anticipated, widely maligned and then critically reconsidered second season of “True Detective,” for example, or his performances in the brutally uncompromising crime films of the director S. Craig Zahler (“Brawl in Cell Block 99,” “Dragged Across Concrete”).
But as good as Vaughn can be with darker characters, I never connected those parts to the man who played them. Ahead of our interview, I made the perhaps-common journalist’s mistake of expecting to talk with someone akin to the playfully glib guy from those comedies I love. (That’s in no small part thanks to how Vaughn’s role as a world-weary, wiseass former detective in the new Apple TV+ series “Bad Monkey” scans as a mature update of his comedic persona.) But what I was expecting from Vaughn wasn’t what I got. Instead, I found someone more provocative and earnest, who came most alive when he put me under the conversational microscope. Which is to say, I got a surprise.
Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with R-rated comedies anymore. Why do you think they’ve become harder to crack? When you talk about the R comedies in Hollywood, I feel like there’s a set of rules that the executives follow. The goal is not to get fired — they can defend why they greenlit something. The R comedies that took off was the studio saying to young people that were funny, “Go ahead.” They didn’t micromanage. We were on the sets changing lines and trying to make each other laugh. It’s not done as well by committee. They started managing everything too much and trying to control it all.
An undercurrent to that answer is that studios got timid. Do you think the culture has changed such that the kinds of movies that were your bread and butter are just not in vogue anymore? Not at all. They’re still culturally in vogue. Look at the stand-up comics. Why is the audience gravitating to those comics that are challenging with the things that they’re doing? You have people that are pushing the envelope, and people are watching. The people that got timid knew better. It wasn’t like they felt righteous. It was just the pressures of the moment.
What do you mean? The culture didn’t change. Human beings are the same now as when the myths were written. Part of storytelling and songs is to explore ideas and allow certain feelings or emotions to come to the forefront because they exist in all of us. The Shel Silverstein song “A Boy Named Sue” that Johnny Cash made famous: The want to kill your parent because of something they did with a name is something that could exist inside people. I don’t know that we have to boycott that song because Shel Silverstein or Johnny Cash are encouraging the murdering of parents for mistakes.
I don’t think anybody is trying to cancel “A Boy Named Sue.” But the thing you’re dancing around is the cancel-culture impulse. Do you think there are stories that are not getting told that should be? No, I’m not dancing around it. There was a moment of certain people feeling like they could be the judge and jury of what is a story or what’s too far. It’s a crazy thing as human beings to think that my ideas are the best and if I can just force people to do what I believe, the world will be great. But, yeah, I don’t need someone to take a book off the shelf. I should be allowed to choose what I read, and part of the journey is exploring things.
What’s something that you saw or read that opened up your mind? It started with literature. The one by Stephen King that really blew me away was “Rage.”
That’s the one about — The school shooter. I read it when I was a freshman in high school. It was about a kid who was disenfranchised.
And takes his class hostage. He takes his class hostage. It was like “The Breakfast Club,” but a darker, R-rated version. He holds the class hostage after shooting the teacher, and he says, we were friends, and now you don’t even look at me in the hallway.
How did it change you? It just gave me perspective. Sometimes someone is hurting and not what they seem. It’s one of the great things about the John Hughes movies, which was lost on the teenage movies that came after him: If you use “The Breakfast Club,” for example, they all arc and transform and realize that they’re complete human beings — they’re not just the jock, or just the homecoming queen, or the weird girl, or the geek. All of those movies still play because they’re investigating and exploring, in a comedic way, the truth.
Your argument is that people are still seeing those movies because they have themes that continue to resonate. I’m not having an argument. It’s more so an observation of reality that in that movie those characters from other backgrounds find a moment of acceptance and perspective on each other, but they start very opposed. So it’s less of an argument, truly, and more of a response to the line of what we’re talking about, which is nothing has changed except you have a bunch of dumb people who think that they are somehow more righteous than their neighbor, who are going to impose through force that it’s somehow bad to explore human beings in the extremes.
This is a heavier question. Mm-hmm.
I was thinking about that period, basically from “Old School” to “Couples Retreat,” when your stuff was really connecting. In that time you did a couple of films with Owen Wilson. He was struggling personally. You guys were friends. He had a suicide attempt. To be having personal success while your pal is at a low ebb — does that teach you something about the meaninglessness of success? I adore Owen. I think he’s not only superfunny and smart but he’s very empathetic. As far as success, it depends on your definition. I never saw success as results. If you feel like you were engaged and you did your best and you feel good about it, sometimes the results aren’t there, but you feel good, because you got better. I say this to you as a parent looking at kids: They’re not going to get a result of a smooth cutting of food at 5. But if they’re trying their hardest and they make mistakes, you’re telling them, You did great, because I saw you holding your fork and you lined your knife up.
I want you to get more personal. OK. Pick any area you want.
Let’s start with filmmaking. What’s something that you weren’t good at and then got better? I would say everything. Acting on camera, learning to talk to the person as if there weren’t cameras. Memorizing dialogue. Now it’s very easy for me, but when I started it was hard.
In your life, what’s something that you weren’t good at that you’ve improved? Everything.
Don’t say “everything” again! Well, I could pick any aspect.
So pick one, and burrow into that baby. Something in my personal life I felt that I wasn’t good at? There was not an area I was good at. Giving a speech publicly was scary to me. Or something as simple as letting a girl know that I liked her. My point with any of these is: You have to take the focus off evaluating yourself negatively. You have to find in it: Why is it worth it to do this? How do I take those things that are a challenge and use those to get better? And it’s OK if it goes bad or it doesn’t go well; I can’t cheat the process of trying. If I’m somehow being less personal or failing you, I’m not aware of how.
I was reading old magazine cover stories about you. Going back and reading those is interesting, because the picture that they paint is of a rabble-rouser. I think every one of those stories involves a scene at a bar. I thought, Are they unable to separate Vince Vaughn the guy from the “Swingers” character? I was a guy who enjoyed going out with friends, and we would definitely go out to bars, but I was also an actor who loved to read and watch things. I mean, I definitely had sides of me. I’ve had a very unique life. I had a lot of extreme experiences that gave me perspectives.
Can you share one? Well, my grandparents on both sides were from different extreme backgrounds. My one grandfather was an Italian immigrant from Naples, who I think only went to school until he was 8. He owned a small carnival park. He was a jeweler; he was a pawnshop broker. He wasn’t around my mom very much. My mom was raised by a single mom — she supported all the kids by herself, had a beauty salon. Then my dad’s father, he was a sharecropper and a steelworker and had a hundred-acre farm. His wife was Christian Lebanese. My dad was the first to go to college in his family. Then I kind of ascended from growing up in apartments and ended up in an upper-class suburb. So I had a lot of exposure to different things and different world views. Going back to “The Breakfast Club,” if we may, you’re talking about an archetype that they were presenting — “That’s a side of me, but it’s not the whole story.”
Do you think the extremes of your background influenced your politics? Am I right that you’re a libertarian? Yes, I definitely am a believer more in allowing individuals to make choices. So I think that drugs should be legal and people should have guns. But I realized that you have different cultures that would feel strongly. Like the hippies would get high and say, We’re not hurting anyone, what’s the big deal? Then the hunters would say, We have these guns, and we have a right to defend ourselves, and what’s the big deal? And they were kind of the same.
Guns and weed are not exactly the same. I’ll tell you why I think it is the same. The fear is if someone gets high, that they’re going to do something or could hurt people. Sometimes they just go to bed. And the fear is, someone has a gun, they might hurt somebody. But sometimes they’re just hunting. We’re so shaped by our environments and where we’re from. Even in parenting. Sometimes people parent the way their parents did.
Or in reaction. I find it to be more complicated than that. I’ll finish the political thing, because I think you’re interested. What I found was there’s always these “other guys”…
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