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Louise Thomas
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In a recent interview, the actor Vince Vaughn expressed wariness at being asked so often about his politics. “I’ll finish the political thing, because I think you’re interested,” he snarked, in response to a not particularly subtle question about gun legislation from The New York Times’s David Marchese. Later, when Marchese asked Vaughn about more of his stances, he replied, courteously but firmly, that he gets asked far more about not believing in gun control than those who do. “There’s a consistency with it,” he added. “It’s like that becomes a focal point.”
In fairness to writers like Marchese, it’s no real surprise that politics dominate Vaughn’s newer interviews. As Vaughn’s mainstream career has dipped, in tandem with an industry that’s lost interest in making mid-budget comedies for adults – films that were once so synonymous with him, such as Old School or Wedding Crashers – his views have become more central to his public image. Unless you were one of the handful of people to see the horror comedy Freaky or the Kristen Bell vehicle Queenpins, the last thing you may have seen Vaughn in was grainy footage of him shaking Donald Trump’s hand at a football game. (That image sparked a mini firestorm in January 2020, before everyone started violently sneezing and then some other stuff happened.)
Vaughn has since clarified that he is a libertarian (so neither allied with the Republican nor Democrat parties), but next to the ubiquitous centre-left liberalism of Hollywood, it still makes him an outlier. Likewise, that he’s been happy to collaborate on documentary series with conservative blowhard Glenn Beck, called for US schools to be armed with guns, and voiced support for politician Ron Paul, who has run for president as both a Republican and a libertarian. Plus, his movies have always been a bit of a clue when it comes to his worldview – they are typically tales of white male bloviating, of a kind that has come to define right-wing politics. That unspoken thread running through his professional choices, mixed in with what we know of Vaughn as a person, has long made him one of the most fascinating – and largely underappreciated – actors in Hollywood.
Vaughn, a man with an intimidating 6ft 4in height and a voice on perpetual fast-forward, found fame as a professional showboater. The buddy comedy Swingers, his 1996 breakthrough, captured and then inspired a particular type of man – the cocky, loutish motormouth who doesn’t so much demand your attention as wear you down until you acquiesce. Later, he’d play a run of fratty man-children in mid-Noughties comedies such as Dodgeball, The Break-Up and the aforementioned Old School and Wedding Crashers. He was the face of an era in film (and, broadly speaking, bro humour entirely) that he’s spent his most recent press tour – for his new Apple TV+ series Bad Monkey, which begins on Wednesday – fondly memorialising.
There was always something magnetic about him, too. Vaughn’s on-screen obnoxiousness could be potent, his personality so loud and outsized that his co-stars would seem to bend to his will. It’s no wonder he was always paired up with smaller, whinier men – your Owen Wilsons, Will Ferrells or Dave Francos in the likes of The Internship, Old School and Unfinished Business, respectively – just to balance out the natural order of things.
Those films tend to get written about now as slightly regressive: deeply male endeavours that reduce women to window-dressing and worship a kind of slovenly juvenilia. I do get it, to an extent – anyone who has sat through the last gasps of Vaughn’s studio movie career, films such as Couples Retreat and The Dilemma, will have no problem with this description. But many of his earlier hits – The Break-Up and Wedding Crashers, specifically – are also quietly prescient when it comes to masculinity in the modern era. They revolve around men stuck in a kind of perpetual adolescence, who find themselves at odds with worlds that seem to be leaving them behind.
These themes have only deepened as Vaughn has entered his grizzled character actor era. In recent years he has worked consistently with S Craig Zahler, a filmmaker drawn to lurid tales of bruised masculinity and white-male entitlement. In 2017’s Brawl in Cell Block 99, Vaughn plays a man forced into a life of thuggish violence after losing his job. In 2018’s Dragged Across Concrete, he is a cop suspended after brutalising a drug dealer. (Just to drive home the film’s gleeful provocations, Mel Gibson plays his partner.)
Both films have been described as departures for Vaughn, but if anything they merely reinforce his interests as an actor. Vaughn’s characters don’t so much express anger at change, but at least discomfort with it. Sometimes they grow and learn, and become better. Other times they don’t – they plant themselves in grievance and bitterness, as if the world owes them something. These are men who also help make sense of Vaughn’s politics, which have never (at least publicly) veered into petty nonsense, and seem confined to those very libertarian ideas of self-sufficiency and personal autonomy.
Sure, you may not agree with him. But there’s something undeniably compelling about an actor who has always stood his ground, quietly if not ambiguously, on the fringes of an industry largely defined by its identikit politics. It’s no wonder people keep asking him about it.
‘Bad Monkey’ streams on Apple TV+ from 14 August
