You're so Vaughn

Vince Vaughn

For the first hour and a half of our interview, Vince Vaughn is - oh, might as well come right out and say it - a bit of a snooze.

He is polite, professional and completely unrevealing. His agenda is to plug the raucous new comedy Wedding Crashers, in which he and Owen Wilson play bachelors who bluff their way into weddings to pick up girls, and he's diligent about staying on message.

He quotes liberally from the modest-celebrity handbook - "My focus has always been work"; "I'm just an actor" - and often begins answers by saying, "You know, it's interesting ... " But don't be fooled. It's not. Perhaps it was silly to expect the guy to conjure up the speed-talking, bile-hurling bons vivants he made famous in Swingers and Old School, the twin pillars of Vaughn's movie library.

But something about his careful blandness suggests that that guy really is in there, lurking, like a class clown waiting for the teacher to leave the room.

And then, just as the interview is winding down, the reporter points out that Vaughn has spent nearly all of it fiddling with a bottle cap, then a plastic straw.

"And I will begin chewing it shortly," says the actor, 35. Then he stands up suddenly. "I quit smoking four months ago and since then I have been biting-chewing-fidgeting with anything that isn't nailed down. I quit cold turkey. I was up to two packs a day, I'm coughing, my eyes are red, I don't have energy, I'm not even enjoying it, so I just said, 'That's it'.

"I think it might've been easier if I went with Nicorette or one of those supplements, but I just don't get that. Let's see, I'm addicted to something, so I know! Let's pop some pills to get over it! Yeah, that makes sense. But now I find myself in conversations where people are looking at me and I'm salivating all over myself."

He laughs - a 1.9m man with a giggle like a little girl. "This is how pathetic and sad it is: you start thinking, 'Who am I without a cigarette in my hand?"'

Ten years into an up-and-down career, here's who Vince Vaughn is now: one of Hollywood's kings of comedy. After his blazing turn as a latter-day Rat Packer in 1996's Swingers, Vaughn kissed off comedy for a string of dramas, including Return to Paradise and Psycho. All of them tanked.

Old School, the 2003 hit about a trio of men who start a college fraternity, was his penance - the film in which he stopped milking his tall, dark handsomeness and returned to mocking it.

Ever since, Vaughn has been money, baby. He killed as the villain in Starsky & Hutch, turned Dodgeball into a US$114 million ($166 million) smash, made Be Cool almost watchable and nailed cameos in Anchorman and Mr & Mrs Smith.

This spring he signed a US$12 million ($17.5 million) deal with Universal to produce and star alongside Jennifer Aniston in The Break Up, a romantic comedy he developed. But his piece de resistance may be the R-rated Wedding Crashers, which has generated so much buzz from sneak peeks that $100 million ($146 million) should come easy.

Vaughn walks away with Wedding Crashers, but the film works because it's a classic buddy flick built on pitch-perfect chemistry.

Wilson, the mop-topped blond with a breezy Texas drawl, plays the romantic lead who, naturally, falls in love with one of his would-be flings (The Notebook's Rachel McAdams).

Vaughn, meanwhile, blows holes through the lovey-dovey stuff with his spitfire delivery. His character spends much of the film in panic mode after bedding a virgin and watching her escalate into a "stage-five clinger".

"It's hard to keep up with him," says Wilson, who met Vaughn during nights out with his brother Luke while the men were shooting Old School.

 

 

"All I know is, I'd be exhausted at the end of the day. Even off-camera it can sometimes reach a fever pitch, where we're both trying to get our point across. I can boil most of our conversations down to 'Your comments are valuable, but allow me to continue'."

The film's hilariously hokey pickup lines ("Scientists say we only use 10 per cent of our brains, but I think we only use 10 per cent of our hearts") are sure to be invoked at every real wedding for years.

Despite his lifelong bachelorhood, Vaughn says he has no additional expertise.

"I've never really hooked up at a wedding," he says. "My only advice to single guys out there is this: go out and star in a couple movies. That makes things a lot easier."

One thing it doesn't necessarily help with, however, is career flexibility. After Vaughn's run of dramatic roles, executives at DreamWorks had to be talked into casting him for Old School - even though he broke out with a near-identical part in Swingers. "They thought I wasn't funny," he says. "I was, like, 'Wait a minute, I started with comedy'."

Now he faces the opposite problem.