Alot of people probably remember Vince Vaughn from Swingers – last year’s cool comedy about friends who hang out in retro-swing dance clubs in Los Angeles. But the most important person impressed by Vaughn’s portrayal of a smooth operator who calls women “babies” was Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg saw the film about the time he was casting The Lost World: Jurassic Park. There was something about Vaughn that made the director think he could play a smart-alecky photographer sent to document the existence of dinosaurs in this sequel to Jurassic Park.
So after almost 10 years of trying to break into big Hollywood movies, Vaughn, 27, found himself summoned to Spielberg’s office.
Waiting for the biggest director in all of Hollywood, Vaughn was so nervous “I lost my breath and stuff. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I was really overwhelmed. I started to think about seeing Jaws when I was 5 years old.”
Watching Vaughn go from wiggling his foot to running his hands over his legs to pulling the sleeve of his shirt down over his fingers, you wonder what array of nervous tics Spielberg was treated to. But he also saw something else – “a new movie star, an American icon to be,” as Spielberg described him to studio executives. Vaughn, who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, has a boyish Midwestern quality along with undoubted sex appeal.
He and Spielberg ended up talking about movies for an hour and a half. “I drove him nuts a little bit probably because I asked him all these questions about Jaws and E.T. Then we talked about Swingers and what he liked about it. It was a blast – I mean, to talk to Steven Spielberg about movies and stuff, like, was so cool.”
Even cooler, Vaughn got hired for The Lost World without having to do a screen test. This after all the parts he just missed getting. “I almost got School Ties, but Brendan Fraser got it. I was very close to the final callback on Dazed and Confused,” he says, adding it was “devastating” to come that close and not get it.
“It’s such a hard process to get to that point. If it goes against you, then it’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go through this whole process again.’ “
Finally, he was cast in Rudy, a 1993 movie about an unathletic guy trying to play football at Notre Dame. “I was in maybe like four scenes, and I had a football helmet on in those scenes so no one recognized me,” Vaughn says. “Then they forgot to ask me to the premiere. It really hurt my feelings at the time.”
Several actor friends were going through the same thing at the same time, and they got together and raised the money to make Swingers, basically to showcase themselves. It worked. Vaughn compares it to The Wizard of Oz, where everybody got something. Screenwriter and star Jon Favreau is writing more screenplays; actor Ron Livingston is doing TV; and Patrick Van Horn, a “big chaser of girls,” according to Vaughn, “has a full dance card.”
Asked if Swingers also made him catnip to women, Vaughn replies with a laugh, “I’ve always had girls come up to me in bars and that kind of thing.” His role in Swingers was based in part on his own good luck with the opposite sex.
What’s changed now is that some of the women who approach him have seen him on the big screen. Vaughn stops short of calling them groupies, but he does say, “There’s nothing attractive about someone just coming up and throwing themselves at you. You don’t want to be rude, so you pretend like you don’t know what’s going on and move away.”
He’s going out with a couple of women, but there’s no one special. “I have to a little bit get my bearings with everything that’s been happening to me. It’s just one of those transitions in life.”
Vaughn has avoided dating actresses, disliking the cliquishness he finds among the Hollywood crowd.
“Everybody seems to have dated everybody else,” he says. “I’m not a big fan of that. I like to go out with someone who’s removed from all that. I don’t mind whatever experiences they’ve had, but I don’t want to know about them. You want to be private in your world. You want it to be a special thing for you.”
Although he knew the odds were against his making it, he headed for Los Angeles right out of high school.
Although movie parts were scarce in the beginning, Vaughn was able to support himself on residuals of almost $60,000 a year from a national commercial for Chevy he did when he was 17. His mother, a real estate agent, and father, a manufacturer’s rep for toys – “I had all the toys when I was growing up,” Vaughn says – didn’t pressure him to get a “real” job.
“I was lucky in that both my parents came from humble beginnings and took chances and were successful at what they wanted to do. So nothing I was doing seemed too crazy, and when I got that Chevy commercial, they thought, ‘The kid’s got a point.’ “
Now they seem even more justified in believing that their son would be one of the very few to make it in Hollywood.
Besides starring in what will probably be the summer’s biggest blockbuster, Vaughn is co-starring with Kate Capshaw (Spielberg’s wife) in The Locusts. “I play a drifter in 1960 who befriends Kate’s son, and she doesn’t like it.”
Vaughn also is making Clay Pigeons with Janeane Garofalo and Joaquin Phoenix. “I play a serial killer and Janeane is an FBI agent hunting me down and Joaquin is this poor guy I’ve kind of targeted not to kill, but to just be in his life.”
