Vince Vaughn: Time Out New York

Time Out New York
By Holly Sorensen
August 13-20, 1998

Is this the face of a Psycho killer?

It's true: The sharp-dressed ladykiller from Swingers has been cast as the less well-dressed lady killer from Psycho - Norman Bates. But before hitting the shower, Vince Vaughn gives a career-making performance in Return to Paradise.

Vince Vaughn is standing by the counter at the House of Pies in LA, but he 28-year-old actor looks like he just stepped down from a combine. Old jeans and a T-shirt cover his 6'5" body: a red Dwight Yoakam hat sits on his head. His face is open, with wide, handsome planes. His forehead looks like Wyoming.

It's easy to think of the Illinois-bred Vaughn as just a nice Midwestern boy. He's very polite, for instance: He insists on buying the banana-cream pie, and when the batteries die in the recorder that will tape this interview, he runs across the street to fetch new ones. When an old man in a rumpled teal jacket keep interrupting the conversation, Vaughn happily talks to him. It's not until the old guy leaves, an hour later, that you glimpse Vaughn's edge: "I love old-timers," he says casually, puffing on a cigarette. "But you can't keep feeding the stray cats. They look cute at first; then the next thing you know, they're clawing for food at two in the morning."

Producer Brian Grazer, who just cast Vaughn in the remake of Psycho, acknowledges the actor's duality. "I thought Vince was just this Midwestern dude," he says. "I liked him, but I never thought of his as Norman Bates. It was [Psycho director] Gus [Van Sant] who wanted to see him. he still seemed square to me, but Gus shook his head and said, 'He's a whole other thing.' I realized Vince is a sweet guy, but he has a dark, odd, freaky quality, too."

The truth is, there is something dangerous about Vaughn. He's very direct, and after virtually every sentence, he looks at you straight in the eye and says, "Do you know what I'm saying to you?" It's almost menacing. In fact, if there is one thing that separates him from the Ben-Leonardo-Matt Pack, it's that Vaughn could kick those guy's asses.

Vaughn was in Los Angeles a full seven years before he pulled off the hat trick that spun him into cover-boy fame: In one 12-month period, from 1996 to 1997, he starred in The Locusts, the indie hit Swingers and Steven Spielberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park. When Spielberg called Vaughn "a new movie star - an American icon-to-be," it was the sound bite heard round the world. "Yeah, it was very kind of him," says Vaughn. "It made me feel good, because I respect him as a director, and it was like your dad saying, 'You did a good job on that.' It made me feel god that way, more than 'this is really going to sell me.' Do you know what I'm saying to you?"

Since then, it's been work, work, work. This month, he stars opposite Anne Heche and Joaquin Phoenix in Return to Paradise, the story of three people who meet in Malaysia and become fast friends. Years later, two of them discover that the third has been incarcerated for a drug crime for which all three are culpable - and that the prisoner will avoid being executed only if the others agree to serve jail time with him. In the movie, Vaughn's character, a limousine driver who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, undergoes a remarkable metamorphosis: He changes - almost physically - from ugly American to cowed choirboy. Next up, Vaughn will play a strange cowboy in the indie noir Clay Pigeons, then Norman Bates in Psycho, and a single dad in the drama A Cool Dry Place. Bang, bang, bang.

So here's the question: Where does a guy who grew up in Chicago's snooty north suburbs and who graduated from Lake Forest High School dig for inspiration to play rakish strangers, serial killers and proletarian shitheads? There are clues. his parents, for example, are fiercely independent and entirely self-made. Then there's the fact that Vaughn grew up near Chicago, the most testosterone-saturated of all American cities, with Iron Mike Ditka and Jim McMahon serving as role models. Like many Chicago boys, Vaughn makes constant use of sports metaphors: "I wasn't a better actor all of a sudden after Swingers and Lost World," he says. "I got called up from the minors, and I had a chance to pitch."

For his part, Vaughn will tell you that the seminal experience of his life was being put in a special class for kids with learning problems. "When you get pulled out of class, you're singled out as being different," he says. "There was the girl who was taller than everyone, so of course she's going to have a hard time learning; a kid whose family maybe wasn't right; one kid from a farm, who didn't take much - they had emotional problems. I was the hyperactive one. I talked back to teachers."

All these experiences - growing up in Illinois, being in the special class and waiting seven years for his big break - have given Vaughn an I-don't-give-a-shit cockiness that serves him well. "It's all about standing up for yourself," he says. "At a certain point, the quarterback has got to stop pleasing the coach. When Swingers came out, I had been kicked around enough, so I didn't care what anyone said."

As most people already know, Swingers evolved organically from Vaughn's friendship with actor-writer Jon Favreau, whom he met on the set of Rudy. After Favreau left a girlfriend and moved to LA, Vaughn dragged him around the cocktail scene, cheering him up with a cheesy lounge-boy personality - the basis for his character, Trent. Oddly enough, as Vaughn tells this story, a big, smiling Hispanic waitress comes over to the table. "Ohhh!" she coos. It's the Shy Guy ! You so shyyy! I saw you in that movie, Shy Guy! I took my little boy! I said 'That's my Shy Guy!'" Vaughn blushes and looks down as she coos at him some more. When she leaves, he explains that he sometimes comes to this pie shop and pretends to be Shy Guy, a man so timid that he can't look at the waitress and has to point to the menu. It's so darn cute, you want to take him home in a basket.

But in a flash, the cocky Vaughn is back: He declares that he hates crowds, doesn't have a group of friends and is undaunted by the prospect of recreating the part of Norman Bates in Psycho, one of the most indelible films ever made: "I think we've got too much time on our hands, always sitting around thinking about what is a classic and what isn't," he says. "This stuff is meant to be lived." Of his infamous self-esteem, Vaughn says, "Just do your work, and that's where the confidence comes form. Acting to me is what plays real. I think it's generational. Our parents had World War II, the Depression; people had more character. Now it's more, 'I'm going to travel for three years and figure out who I am.' That's fine, but it leads to a softness, and our actors and our music reflect that."

This is not to say that Vaughn is just a macho man. Although he has a deep distrust of organized anything, he has a spiritual side that borders on spooky. Since he was a kid, he's felt "vibes." His teachers had a bad vibe. The beach in LA has a bad vibe. The fat little Chinese god of good fortune has a good vibe, but the Thai Buddha has a bad vibe. ("In Return to Paradise, they wanted us to go bow down before that guy," he says. "No way.") He intimates that sixth sense is helpful in card games. "When you're young, you're in touch with things," he says. "You get older, you lose it and become more practical. It's like poker: Someone who's a Yale mathematician will say there is no such thing as trends in cards, but I know there is."

Outside, it's black all of a sudden, which is how it gets dark in LA in the summer. Before hopping into his gray Bronco, Vaughn bums a cigarette. "you gotta go through your life, gotta make mistakes, " he says. "You're not gonna sit on the bench ten years and analyze. You've come to play. It's like the bases are loaded; there are two outs. I want t be at the plate. Do you know what I'm saying to you?"