Vince Vaughn: It ain't what he says, it's the way that he says it

The Belfast Telegraph

A run of hit comedies has made Vince Vaughn one of Hollywood's most bankable stars. Adam Rynne meets the man who's put a smile back on Jennifer Aniston's face
28 July 2006

Actors have voices. Of course, they have faces also, but unanimously, it is the way that they intonate, utter, relay and convey that becomes - if perhaps subconsciously for an audience that is staring upon a widescreen facade - characteristic and influential. And Vince Vaughn has a voice that almost sounds unlike any other.

He leans on certain syllables with a seemingly haphazard inconsistency, allowing sounds that the rest of us would normally accentuate come out untouched, before taking the last letter of the final word in his concluding sentence and elongating it out into a lingering drone.

There is no sense to the way that his voice goes up and down at will, no pattern to jump aboard. So that his pragmatic deduction that "people are just doing their jobs. They're trying to sell a magazine or they're trying to sell a TV show" becomes a rollercoaster of breathless rhythm and timbre. He speaks inordinately quickly and with a disregard for conventional punctuation until the closing sound is delivered as smooth and never-ending.

He never appears to need a breath and, as he soars, stays high and then plunges down into a stretched dip, it all becomes rather hypnotic.

"You really can't moan about it," the remarkable voice starts. "I mean, my outlook on it has always been that people are just doing their jobs. They're trying to sell a magazine or they're trying to sell a TV show. It's not personal.

"They do it to anyone, whether it's an actor, a musician or a politician. If you realise it's not personal, you don't take it personally. And I really just sort of laugh at it. I'm always curious to see what I've been up to lately or what the next big plan is.

"It's a bit ridiculous," he continues, as I start to feel like Mowgli in The Jungle Book having just encountered the spellbinding snake with the captivating voice (I wonder if my eyes are doing big, hurdy-gurdy circles and swirls).

"There's such a fascination these days with the celebrity side or the success side. Even outside of acting there's such a focus on success, on accomplishing, on money, but not really a focus on working hard or doing a good job on something.

"When I started at 18, there was only one show in America called Entertainment Tonight that was on for half an hour and was about celebrity lives. Now, there's like seven shows. There's entire networks dedicated to it and, sadly, I think a lot of the younger kids are choosing to be actors or musicians, not because they want to act or be musicians, but really they're just looking to be famous. And I would really caution them that that's the kind of the stuff that you deal with that's not the most fun side."

The actor who became famous, through Doug Liman's Swingers, for his rampant talking, rampant whining and rampant berating - the actor who has been regularly positioned onscreen as a feral motor-mouth - has now become a whole different Hollywood animal.

When the insanely dumb and extremely entertaining Dodgeball was released in 2004, Vaughn told me that he liked to keep a low profile, that when he was dating someone he didn't need to have it dissected and profiled and visualised in journals and newspapers.

He was an actor, at that time, about whom little, personally, was discussed or speculated upon. Then a couple of things happened.

Dodgeball took over $$100m - the golden milestone in the genuine creation of a top-line, commercial movie star - at the box office.

Vaughn then played a supporting loudmouth in Mr & Mrs Smith, which brought back $$428m.

Next, the Chicago-raised actor starred opposite Owen Wilson in Wedding Crashers; the budget was $$40m, the return was $$283m. And so, Vince Vaughn had become a dependably and remarkably profitable comedy star, of which there is only a handful.

Just as significantly, however, Vaughn appeared to begin dating Jennifer Aniston, having met her on the set of his new picture, The Break-Up. The actress had recently - and to the disturbing and lascivious interest of global media - finished a marriage with fellow actor Brad Pitt, and anything to do with the former Friends comedienne - clothes, where she ate, whom she appeared in public alongside - had been deemed of essential importance.

Which brings us back to photographers now sifting through Vince Vaughn's rubbish, bidding wars for exclusive portraits of a couple-at-rest and, on the other side of the fence, the sale on E-bay of a jar apparently containing a quantity of Californian air through which Pitt and his new partner, Angelina Jolie, had just strolled through.

Relaxed and smoking, laid back across a London sofa, Vaughn has just attended to the matter of "people are just doing their jobs, they're trying to sell magazines..." He is unusually tall, well-dressed in a dapper suit and is both charming and easily likeable. (I overheard a breathless: "Oh my God, he's a beaut" from a small corner of ladies that he's just met).

His demeanour betrays hardly any worries, as he explains in regard to his new-found notoriety off-screen: "My grandfather was a dairy farmer, both my parents worked to support us, my sister's a school teacher. I just think there's kind of like real problems and real struggles that people go through and I think it's all a bit ridiculous. It's not that important." Many say that, but with him you believe it. Fine, let's move on.

The Break-Up is an unusual and interestingly fearless movie, almost a harking back to classic Hollywood comedy where married couples argue, try to poison each other, and remarry, all to the beat of a rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, all under the roof of a handsome and confined city apartment.

Directed by Peyton Reed (Bring It On and Down With Love), the picture tells of Gary and Brooke (Vaughn and Aniston) and the downward plummet of their two-year relationship. She accuses him of being unthinking and unsupportive; he charges her with nagging. The break-up comes. Neither wants to leave the shared apartment so both set out to undermine the confidence and security of the other.

Blending often wonderfully timed comedy with darker, closer drama, The Break-Up (which, in keeping with Vaughn's newfound capacities, comfortably passed through the $$100m at the US box-office) was something of a pet project for the actor-turned-producer.

The first picture to be put through his recently established production company, Wild West Picture Show Productions, the project offered Vaughn the potential to nurse through the Hollywood system an unconventional romantic comedy that could also take him back to the Swingers days of mass collaboration between cast and crew, irregular American movie making and on-set improvisation.

"I think I was always influenced by the American movies of the 1970s," he tells me, "which of course was influenced by the European cinema. You have much more flawed characters and a lot more ambiguity in the movie, less sort of definitive stuff.

"These two young writers," he continues of Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender who authored The Break-Up alongside Vaughn, "were very good, but I said, 'We just really can't go and sell this idea to a studio and have them pay us, because we'll never get this story to be told the way we want it to be told. There'll be too many voices and too many notes and we'll get lost. We'll have to sort of write it and then take it to a studio.'

"Me being an actor and coming from improvisation, I really like to improve the characters. I like to sit back and say (to other actors), 'What's your interpretation?' and I think you always want to have an environment where ideas are welcome. You get a better movie because of it."

With Vaughn's long-time collaborator Jon Favreau (Swingers, Made) starring as Gary's loyal, if easily confused best friend and Joey Lauren Adams (Chasing Amy) appearing as a mature ally of Brooke's, The Break-Up observes the eviscerating competition and terribly human ruthlessness that can define the implosion of any relationship.

Brooke appears naked and attractive in front of Gary, before allowing her new date and her ex-boyfriend to meet only a couple of minute later; Gary hosts what looks like an orgy in the apartment that he still shares with his ex-girlfriend. Attempts at a civilised co-existence descend into bitter and frequently appealing comical farce, while friends and colleagues fashion a reluctant chorus line.

Described by Vaughn as, "much more independent in nature, but made at a studio level", The Break-Up, deliberately shot in muted colours so as to avoid the sugary lustre of traditional rom-com, appears to be Vaughn's latest attempt at some genuine adult comedy, at some genuine intelligent filmmaking.

"I would be open to doing anything if it was good. I've been on a comedy run for a while and part of that was with everything that was going on in the world, I thought it was a good time to try to make folks laugh, maybe bring people together through comedy.

"With this movie, I wanted to do something different in this genre."

Behind the enjoyable rudimentary on-screen persona, Vince Vaughn has masked a more weighty and insightful reality. It is this astuteness that has ensured the longevity of his career. Following Swingers in 1996, a role in The Lost World: Jurassic Park in 1997, the portrayal of a caring father in A Cool Dry Place a year later and the re-interpretation of Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant's restoration of Hitchcock's Psycho, his identity is that of a flexible, interested actor.

His return to high-profile comedy, first with Old School in 2003 and then Starsky & Hutch in 2004, saw him construct for himself a position at the forefront of the new breed of Hollywood comedy actors, a troupe of performers that include Ben Stiller, Owen and Luke Wilson and Will Ferrell.

Having raised more than half-a-billion dollars with three movies, Vaughn now appears intent on revising one of film's oldest genres, the protected romantic comedy.

"If this movie is successful," he suggests, "it could open the door for other people who want to do non-traditional movies and maybe get a chance for there to be some other options out there, instead of the same story over and over again."

The Break-Up is at cinemas across Northern Ireland.

Posted by Christine at July 28, 2006 9:50 AM