Vince Vaughn: Washington Post

A Working Actor
Vince Vaughn Takes His Success Seriously

By Paula Span
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 25, 1998; Page B01

NEW YORK—Vince Vaughn, everyone says, can be a card. A joker, a mischief-maker, always looking for a lark.

How about all those after-work prank phone calls he made in Utah, where he was shooting "Clay Pigeons," a menacing farce that's opening today? "He'd call the psychic hot lines over and over, pretending to be someone searching for answers," co-star Janeane Garofalo reveals. "My favorite was the chronic bedwetter."

How about the way he took the stage with the band at a post-premiere party the other night and channeled Elvis? "They did a punk-rock version of 'Little Sister,' " reports Joaquin Phoenix, his friend and co-star, who acted as emcee.

In fact, here's Vaughn cutting up between press appointments. Garofalo is hopping around a hotel hospitality suite full of publicists and junketeers. "I don't want to dance," she's mock-yelping. "No! I don't want to!" And Vaughn, who grew up watching old westerns on TV, is scowling and hollering, "Dance! Dance!" while firing the contents of a bottle of Evian water at her feet.

But when Vaughn settles onto a couch to talk about being a Rising Young Actor -- since a memorable turn as the strenuously cool Lothario in the 1996 indie hit "Swingers" -- the high jinks stop. No gags or self-effacing yarns. None of the smarmy allure on display in "Swingers" or "Clay Pigeons," in which he gets more laughs as a serial killer than one might think possible. This is about work. This is serious.

Something in Vaughn's Midwestern marrow -- he's 28 and grew up in Illinois -- makes working so crucial that everything else sounds puny and pale by comparison. "I feel better when I'm working; when I'm not I feel idle," he says. A few years back, as he worked odd telemarketing jobs in L.A. and waited for his career to ignite, he was bewildered to see other underemployed actors taking vacation trips. "I hadn't achieved anything yet -- how could I reward myself?"

It's no different now that he's connected, with leading roles in Steven Spielberg's most recent dinosaur epic, "The Lost World"; in the current drama "Return to Paradise" with Anne Heche; in the Gus Van Sant-directed remake of "Psycho" (Vaughn plays Norman Bates), which will hit theaters in December. "There's no reason, at 28, to sit around for six months in the Bahamas," Vaughn says. "I'd feel sick to my stomach."

Indeed, he's full of nervous energy, jiggling one foot, tapping a hand on the sofa, talking fast, smoking but apologizing for it. Even his clothing is businesslike: laced oxfords, tailored pants, gray shirt, a 5 o'clock shadow the only actorish touch and hey, it is 5 o'clock.

Nothing about Vaughn conveys comfort with Hollywood and its folkways; in fact, he seems wary of the place. Take the acting class he enrolled in there, having lit out for the Coast at 18 with a high school diploma and a Chevy "Heartbeat of America" commercial as his major credentials.

The imperious instructor told his students: "If you haven't had two years of ballet, how dare you step on my stage? If you haven't had two years of voice, how dare you speak on my stage?" Vaughn's still incredulous. "This pretentious, snobby point of view," he says. "It was like a religion, and you were supposed to be humble." He watched a student break down and sob -- "a grown man," he points out with some disdain -- when the instructor seemed displeased. Vaughn stuck around long enough to pick up some techniques he found useful, then bolted. It wasn't his style.

Vaughn's style comes from his family: his grandfather the dairy farmer ("chewed tobacco, strong as a horse"); his father, who put himself through college via the Navy; his mother, raised by a single beautician. The Vaughns eventually prospered enough to move to the affluent Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, but Vince always identified more with their working class, Farm Belt origins. "I felt pressure not to get soft," he says.

"Vince thinks of himself as the Everyman," assesses the director of "Clay Pigeons," David Dobkin. "He loves to hang out and play cards and go to the horse races. If you meet him for lunch, it's always blue-plate specials and cheap beers." A hard-core fan of the country-western music that constitutes much of the movie's soundtrack, Vaughn did not report for duty in Idaho empty-handed. "He showed up with a duffel bag full of Buck Owens and George Jones and Hank Williams Jr.," Dobkin reports.

The string of recent movies, the attention starting to focus on him like a laser, only makes Vaughn more cautious about succumbing to palm-tree sensibilities. "I've never owned a new car; I still don't," he volunteers, though he's bought a few lately for family members. "I still live in the same apartment I've lived in for nine years." At least it's less crowded than it used to be: He sometimes had three or four other aspirants in residence in his one-bedroom flat, sleeping on mattresses on the floor. "I'd charge them a couple of hundred bucks a month, so I'd have walking-around money."

That was back in the pre-"Swingers" years, which seemed to stretch on and discouragingly on. "I got that Chevy commercial and thought, 'This is it now,' " Vaughn says. "When I did my first guest spot on TV" -- he showed up sporadically on series like "Doogie Howser, M.D." and "21 Jump Street" -- "I thought, 'This is it.' " He landed a role in a studio film, a feel-good football saga called "Rudy" -- "but most of my scenes, I'm in a helmet," he remembers. "It was kind of embarrassing. I called my parents and had to tell them to look for Number 44."

"Rudy" was a flop, but it did introduce Vaughn to his fast friend Jon Favreau, who also was seeking fame and fortune in L.A., or at least a decent role. When they decided to go the Mickey Rooney route and put on a show, Favreau wrote the "Swingers" screenplay in two weeks. The chronicle of four young would-be hipsters seeking fame and fortune in L.A., or at least a decent role, it was shot in 21 days for a paltry quarter of a million bucks. "I always saw them as pathetic losers," Vaughn says of the quartet, "but in revealing that, there's something cool as well."

He played the unctuous Trent, who is almost as suave as he thinks he is and spouts a ridiculous Vegasy patois: "You're so money, baby." Fans who recognize him won't let Vaughn forget the phrase. "They command him to perform," Garofalo says. " 'Say it! Say it!'"

But how can he complain? "Swingers" earned a pile of money and a sheaf of delirious reviews, and everyone who mattered saw it. Vaughn had hoped the movie would get some film festival attention, and maybe he'd get an agent, his previous one having dumped him. What he didn't expect was a phone call from Steven Spielberg. " 'Swingers' wasn't even like a film, it was my friends putting on makeup in the back of a van," he muses. "Now we're in 'The Lost World,' and you can't believe the food spread."

The Manhattan opening for "Swingers" was also the first time Vaughn saw New York. "I always wanted to feel justified in going," he explains. "To say, 'My work brought me here.' "

Now it does, all the time. Vaughn's part of the floating repertory company that populates a lot of independent films, along with Garofalo, his buddy Phoenix and his girlfriend, Joey Lauren Adams of "Chasing Amy." But the big studios want him too. And when directors cast him, they tend to invoke similarly contradictory phrases to explain why. Here's Dobkin: "I wanted someone who could be charming and dangerous at the same time."

Charisma and threat coexist, in varying ratios, in a number of Vaughn's roles. Trent's dangerous only in that he's likely to break women's hearts. Lester Long in "Clay Pigeons" is another story. He has a fringed-shirt wardrobe inspired by Dwight Yoakam, a mirthless cackle that's Vaughn's own inspired invention, and an airy philosophy: "Some people just need killin'." The film, Phoenix says, "is kind of a twisted buddy movie."

Vaughn wasn't sure about it at first. "I thought, this is kind of sick. Not really my taste. Lester's almost a demonic character, this dark force. But to play it for comedy . . . I thought, this could be cool. Something sort of original."

Probably not as original, though, as the screenplay that "Favz" -- that's Favreau -- has come up with for their next let's-put-on-a-show. At last, Vaughn gets to do a western, sort of. He's not always serious. "I play a guy from Chicago who sleeps with the cattle baron's wife, and the cattle baron wants me dead and I'm on the run in the Old West," he explains. "And Favreau's a Hasidic gunfighter. It's a comedy."