Vince Vaughn: W Interview

Vince Charming
Interview by Merle Ginsberg

He has chased babes and dinosaurs. Now actor Vince Vaughn tackles Hollywood's original serial killer in Psycho.

Los Feliz may have become the hippest neighborhood in Los Angeles, the streets now brimming with club-crawling, would-be Rat Packers. But the neighborhood's as good as ruined for one of its residents, actor Vince Vaughn. he knew this would happen. After all, he helped ruin it.

Nearly every scene of his breakout movie, the almost cult classic Swingers, was shot there, and now when he ventures out after dark to one of his former haunts, he has to rely on his new celebrity to bypass the long lines and get through the door. Inside, some wannabe swinger inevitably sidles up to the gangly 6-foot 5-inch, hard-to-hide actor. "Vince," the guy says, slapping him on the back. And then, breaking into the pseudo-hipster lingo adopted by the Swingers groupies, "You're so money , and you don't even know it! Where are all the beautiful babies tonight?"

Which is why Vince Vaughn has chosen mid-afternoon to turn up at his old hangout, the Hollywood Hills Coffee Shop. He slinks in a little hesitantly, choosing purposefully not to take the red Naugahyde booth he and Favreau sat in while shooting the movie's last scene.

"I haven't been here in six months," he whispers. "Maybe they got sick of me. Maybe they won't recognize me during the day."

No such luck. The waiter brings him a Coke and shoot Vaughn a sly grin. "Hey dude," he mutters. "Welcome back."

"And its' always guys," Vaughn sighs. "I made an independent movie thinking I'd have chicks crawling all over me. In stead, I got guys who emulate me because they - wrongly - think I'm some kind of real swinger." Besides, he says, the characters in Swingers, which Favreau wrote using plenty of Vaughn's self-styled slang, were based on the way they were when they first arrived in Hollywood: "Pathetic."

The partying, gambling, and chick-chasing days Vaughn spent desperately seeking acting jobs are over, replaced suddenly with more work than he ever dreamed of during those seven dry years. After Swingers, he landed Steven Spielberg's The Lost World, made a small movie called The Locusts with Spielberg's wife, Kate Capshaw, then shot a number of films one right after another: A Cool Dry Place, Clay Pigeons with his pal Joaquin Phoenix and Return to Paradise wit Anne Heche and Phoenix. And he's about to play infamous mama's boy, Norman Bates in a remake of Hitchcock's Psycho by Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant - with Heche in the Janet Leigh screamer role. Return to Paradise comes out in August, and the rest in quick succession, with Psycho aimed at a December release.

"There hasn't been a lot of time between movies lately," the 28-year-old says, shaking his head. "I spent to much time out here waiting to make movies. I wanted to take the opportunities while they were coming. You don't just realize how taxing it's going to be before it happens."

He sure looks as if he's been through hell. The usually strapping Vaughn just dropped 25 pounds for Psycho, and now he's gaunt. "My big diet is horrible - I just smoke a lot and don't eat," he says. "My fingers are turning yellow. But i don't mind having sunken eyes right now. It can be kind of cool, in pictures and in movies. The flaws are what make something nice."

Which may be why Vaughn has found himself gravitating to more oddball roles, like the drifter single dad in A Cool, Dry Place, and a cowboy serial killer with a heart of gold in Clay Pigeons, a movie being billed as a "comedy noir." It's hard to imagine the joker of Swingers brandishing a big kitchen knife during one particularly intense sex scene in Clay Pigeons, but Vaughn - by watching his heroes Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen - taught himself to be frightening.

"Simple can be scary, you know," he says. "The thing that 's fun for me with flawed characters is to make them likable. Even though Lester's a killer, he's sort of charming and endearing. I always thought if he met the right girl, he wouldn't kill her."

Although he pulled it off in Clay Pigeons, he had doubts he could be chilling enough for Norman Bates. "I got a call saying [Van Sant] was interested in me for Psycho, so I went to talk to him," Vaughn remembers. "I handled it all wrong: I said 'I'm really scared of this, I'm not sure what to do with it.' And at the end of the conversation, he said, 'Well, I'd like you to do it.' Wonder if he saw me running from the dinosaurs. Maybe I should play Norman Bates as a swinger: He should go around telling everyone they're money. That's pretty scary."

Vaughn and Heche found out they'd be working together again while still shooting Return to Paradise, in which she plays a lawyer pushing limo driver Vaughn and a buddy to return to Malaysia, where a third friend (Phoenix) will hang if they don't go back and do time on drug charges. The fact that Heche's character in the movie falls for Vaughn's has spawned rumors that she left Ellen DeGeneres for him off the set.

"How funny is that?" he says, laughing. Vaughn calls his co-star " a great actress" and brushes off any suggestion that she might not be a credible romantic lead. "All that was important to me was, is she a nice person? Does she do her work? Is she cool? To me, everyone's entitled to feel exactly what they do. Does her being in love with Ellen affect her acting? I'm not a limo driver in New York, and I acted that. What did bother me was the media circus of her and Ellen. You don't need to advertise your politics; your actions speak for what you like. When I see actors or musicians getting political, I want to scream, 'Shut up and play the guitar.'"

Meanwhile, Vaughn, who's kept his own love life private for the last few years, is starting to open up about it. He confesses charmingly that he's always had luck with the women, crediting his height and growing up with two older sisters. While he's careful never to mention her name, it's clear that his current girlfriend is his recent Cool, Dry Place co-star, Chasing Amy's Joey Lauren Adams.

"Most people probably know," he sighs, "It's not a secret. I don't like to discuss it much. When you're young and going through things, you make mistakes and hurt people's feelings."

Adams has even managed to lure him from Los Feliz. "I've been told my apartment's rancid," he says, "so I stay at my girlfriend's more plush. quaint apartment."

Raised in the Chicago suburbs, Vaughn skipped college and moved to LA at 18. Although he insists his childhood was not as "Mayberry" as it sounds, he says his family instilled rock-solid values.

"I know where I'm from and what I'm about," he explains. "My dad, Vernon Vaughn, is a self-made man who taught me that your family and your real friends keep you from being an asshole. They won't be impressed with your money if you turn out to be a liar."

So, now that he's a hot commodity in Hollywood after some lean years, how is he taking advantage of it? Is he invoking the ghosts of Frank and Dean, as his Swingers groupies would have it?

Not exactly. Mostly, he claims, he stays in with his girlfriend, has friends over and plays board games.

"Even when I was in these bars all the time," he says with a smile, "I could never even conceive of that feeling, like 'Boy, am I havin' a night!' You know what I mean? Those guys in Swingers had just seen too many movies, man."