Vince Vaughn: Jezebel Magazine

Swingin' into Stardom
By Alex Lassiter
October 1998

Hollywood's Next Great Actor Enters The Bates Motel

Vince Vaughn, the actor who first made a name for himself as Trent, the suave Rat Pack throwback in 1996’s sleeper hit, Swingers, may indeed be “money baby,” but you might not know it from the way he looks this Sunday morning.

As he walks into the Ritz-Carlton hotel room in Marina Del Ray, California, where he will be conducting his first JEZEBEL interview to promote his latest film, Return To Paradise, the first thing you notice is his height — a slam-dunking six feet, five inches. Having apparently lost a lot of weight for his next role, filling Anthony Perkins’ shoes as the lead in director Gus Van Zant’s remake of Psycho, Vaughn looks little like the swanky stud he portrayed in Swingers, although he does exhibit several signs of the late-night partying lifestyle. Wearing a brown, wrinkled, long-sleeved shirt and wash’n’wear dark gray slacks, the actor sports a five o’clock shadow that suggests days without a shave, not to mention bags under his eyes that suggests nights without sleep. As he sits down to discuss his roles in Return To Paradise, Psycho, and this Fall’s upcoming release Clay Pigeons, I can only laugh as I note one visual hint that Vaughn is not as far from Trent as his current appearance might seem to suggest — throughout our interview, Vaughn constantly chain-smokes from a pack of cigarettes. The brand? Players...

On the surface, it seems almost laughably appropriate for an actor who emerged from out of nowhere to become Hollywood’s #1 boy in 1996, before young guns Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Leonardo Di Caprio came along and stole his thunder. But once you get to talking with Vaughn, you get the feeling that he might be happier being out of the media’s intense spotlight, pursuing his craft more quietly, if not completely anonymously. Like many young actors whom the media have dubbed “rising stars” in a feeding frenzy of hyperbole, but who have yet to prove themselves consistently bankable marquee talents, Vaughn seems to balance an enormous amount of gratitude for his good fortune with a healthy dose of caution brought on by a deeper understanding of fame’s fickle nature.

“The thing with Swingers was, you’re out here for seven years, not doin’ much work, then your friend writes a script and you believe it has value to it,” recalls Vaughn, whose co-star in the film, writer/actor Jon Favreau, was also his good friend in real life. “So you go ahead, and when people say it doesn’t have value, you make it anyway. Then, for it to be accepted, you feel confidence because you feel your ideas translate to something that’s good. Sadly enough, if it wasn’t perceived that way, I don’t know where I’d be today. It might have been a confusing time, but it gave me enough confidence to go into the next project. My whole thing is, just do roles that you like and relate to, and you’ll do a good job.”

Strangely enough, although his role in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 blockbuster sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park doesn’t quite fit the formula, several of Vaughn’s roles do show a certain consistency that gives insight into the actor behind them. In Swingers, Vaughn’s character was a happy-go-lucky party guy whose boisterous personality and shallow exterior hid a genuinely caring individual with a surprising vulnerability. Likewise, Sheriff, Vaughn’s character in Return To Paradise, at first appears to be a selfish lout who’d rather let a friend die than take responsibility for his own actions, but in the end proves to have a surprisingly strong moral fiber at the core of his being. So what are these high-energy, smart-assed, morally ambiguous roles supposed to tell us about Vaughn as a person?

“As an actor,” Vaughn confesses, “I probably gravitate toward roles that I can relate to, to some degree. I’m from the Midwest. My father’s a self-made man, very successful, but he’s also the first generation off the farm. He grew up with outhouses, and his dad was a factory worker. And for me, I didn’t have a California upbringing — I didn’t talk about my feelings and that sort of stuff. My grandfather, who wasn’t emotional, never told me he loved me, but he told my dad that he loved him one time in his whole life. They were working in a barn, and he said, ‘Hey, Vernie, ya know ... I love ya, son.’ And it crushed him. To me, that’s real. The stuff that’s written [where all of a character’s emotions are laid out on the table], I don’t understand it. I didn’t grow up with it. I can relate to Sheriff not thinkin’ he’s worth a lot. I graduated really low in my class. I was popular, but I don’t think a lot was expected of me after school.”

I ask Vaughn what types of movies he liked the most when he was growing up, and he sentimentally recalls The Bad News Bears, the 1976 film in which a ragtag bunch of misfit underdogs — among them an alcoholic coach played by Walter Matthau, a troubled teenage girl played by Tatum O’Neal, and a juvenile delinquent played by Jackie Earle Haley — overcome all odds, banding together to take their Little League baseball team to the championship.

“That movie breaks my heart,” he admits without a hint of sarcasm. “It seems like a lot of the people I had in my life who just had a lot of charm. You may have a guy who’s broke and drunk, but who’s sort of charming and has a class to him, and Walter Matthau was that guy to me in that film. He’s in the dugout with Tatum O’Neal and she says to him, ‘After baseball season, we could hang out.’ And he says, ‘I don’t want to hang out. If I wanted to hang out with ya, don’t ya think I would’ve looked you up?’ She’s just a 12-year-old girl. She starts screaming, and he throws a beer in her face and says, ‘Shut yer mouth!’ Well, she walks away with tears in her eyes, but she plays it like she’s not hurt, like ‘I’m cool.’ Then you go back to the dugout, and Matthau is crying.”

“To me,” Vaughn continues passionately, “that’s interesting. It’s real and truthful — not ideal maybe, but I understand it. That chokes me up more than everyone being emotionally available right off the bat. I didn’t grow up with that, and you start to wonder how real it is after a while. These characters I’ve played were guys that I related to. They weren’t mean or anything, just products of their environment, and that’s what was special about them.”

Not used to such willing self-analysis from Hollywood stars, I am momentarily stunned by Vaughn’s honesty. After all, here is a prominent actor — a person paid substantial sums to convey a broad variety of emotions on screen — who seems to be admitting that emotions never came easily to him in real life. How ironic, then, that Return To Paradise is the actor’s most dramatic turn to date, requiring him to portray an impressively broad range of feelings — from joy, irreverence and lust to anger, fear, grief and moral confusion. Was the role of Sheriff the actor’s most difficult to date?
“No more or less than any other role. A lot of scripts that you get,” Vaughn laments, “especially for younger actors, are people talking about what they would do or their opinions and philosophies on this or that. The thing that was interesting, and the reason this role wasn’t that difficult, is that they were actively pursuing something or trying to decide something real in their life versus just saying, ‘I think I would do this or that.’ From that standpoint, I think it was almost easier, because I had something real to react to.”

And perhaps more importantly to Vaughn, someone real to interact with. Both of Vaughn’s main co-stars in Return To Paradise, Anne Heche and Joaquin Phoenix, were actors whom he had admired prior to the making of the film. He has since re-teamed with both, acting opposite Phoenix in the forthcoming Clay Pigeons, and co-starring with Heche, who will reprise Janet Leigh’s role (shower-scene victim), as Norman Bates in Psycho. According to Vaughn, working with talented co-stars can make even the most emotionally draining films seem like a picnic.

“My whole thing is that I want my acting to try to be truthful. I was a fan of Anne’s before I did this, and I was a fan of Joaquin in To Die For, so I was excited to work with both of them. When you work with people that you think are good, it’s easier to go to a place where you don’t even know what’s gonna happen. There’s something great about being in the moment and being simple and trying to live truthfully...,” he says enthusiastically, “it brings out stuff that you can’t really plan. And that’s the scary thing about film — sometimes you do something really great and the camera is not on you, but you have to trust that whatever comes up is right at the time.”

Obviously, much of what Vaughn has come up with to date is just peachy, because his roles in Return To Paradise and Clay Pigeons have some critics predicting little gold statues in the actor’s future. But in the meantime, his turn as Norman Bates could be the role that makes or breaks his Hollywood career. After all, it’s one thing to remake an obscure 1990 French film called Force Majeure as Return To Paradise, but another thing altogether to remake a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock, one of film history’s greatest directors. But if you believe Vaughn, the actor is less concerned with how the film is perceived by critics than he is with doing the best job he can.

“At first I was scared,” he admits with the rare honesty that’s making him more likable by the minute, “but then I thought, ‘Ya know, it’s done with music all the time!’ People remake songs. Plays are done over and over again. Shakespeare’s been done since way back. Just because it’s a film, I don’t think that means that it shouldn’t be allowed. I don’t look at filmmaking like a religion — that cheats you out of being a part of it, being equal to it. I think it’s an art, and it’s meant to be explored and enjoyed.”

And what of the fact that Psycho will mark the second film in a row in which Vaughn plays a deranged, sociopathic serial killer? In Clay Pigeons, the actor plays Lester Long, a murderous swaggering cowboy who gets his new friend Clay (Joaquin Phoenix) in a whole mess of trouble with the law. After several films in which Vaughn portrayed superficial, selfish party guys with a deeper goodness inside of them, is the actor enjoying exploring these opportunities to play against type?

“Well, I really don’t like the energy of playing serial killers,” Vaughn assures me convincingly, “but I do feel fortunate that I get the chance to play different types of roles. To me, it would get old playing the same thing over and over again, because my attention span isn’t too great. You grow and learn by doing different stuff, and going outside of what’s safe and comfortable for you is always kind of scary ... I like that feeling.”