The self-proclaimed libertarian has at times surprised audiences by shaking Trump’s hand and calling for more guns in American schools; However, his view of the world has spread throughout his acting projects, writes Adam White, and has made him particularly intriguing on screen.
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In a recent interview, actor Vince Vaughn expressed his distrust of being asked so often about his political views. “I’m going to put the political question aside because I think you’re interested,” he said wryly, in reaction to a not-so-subtle question about David’s gun laws. Later, when Marchese asked Vaughn about other of his positions, he replied, albeit firmly, that he is asked many more questions about not believing in gun control than they do about what they do. believe. ” There is coherence there,” he added. It feels like it becomes a focal point. “
To be fair to writers like Marchese, it’s not unexpected that politics will dominate Vaughn’s new perspectives. As Vaughn’s career plummeted, along with an industry losing interest in making low-budget adult comedies—films that were once synonymous with him—like Old School or Wedding Crashers—his perspectives have become more central to his audience’s symbol. Unless you’re one of the few people who watched the horror-comedy Freaky or Kristen Bell’s Queenpins vehicle, the last thing you would have noticed about Vaughn was a grainy symbol of him shaking hands with Donald Trump at a football game. This symbol sparked a mini-firestorm in January 2020, before everyone started sneezing violently and then other things happened. )
Vaughn has since made it clear that he is a libertarian (thus not allied with the Republican or Democratic parties), but compared to Hollywood’s ubiquitous center-left liberalism, that still makes him an exception. Similarly, he was pleased to collaborate on documentary series with conservative braggart Glenn Beck, called for American schools to be armed with guns, and expressed support for politician Ron Paul, who ran for president as a Republican and a libertarian. Also, his films have been something of a clue when his worldview goes, they’re usually stories of white men gossiping, the kind that has come to delineate right-wing politics. This common thread running through his career choices, combined with what we know about Vaughn as a person, has long made him one of Hollywood’s most desirable (and largely underrated) actors.
Vaughn, a boy with an intimidating 6-foot-4 height and a quick, perpetual voice, rose to fame as a professional braggart. The comedy with friends Swingers, its breakthrough in 1996, captured and then encouraged a specific type of man: the arrogant, rude talker who doesn’t divert your attention but exhausts you until you nod. Later, he would play a series of sibling children in comedies of the mid-2000s, such as Dodgeball, The Break-Up and the aforementioned Old School and Wedding Crashers. He was the face of an era of cinema (and, speaking, all humor) that devoted his latest press excursion, for his new Apple TV series Bad Monkey, which begins Wednesday, fondly commemorating.
There was also something magnetic about him. Vaughn’s obnoxious on-screen character may be simply powerful, his personality so strong and outsized that his co-stars seem to bend to his will. No wonder she has been linked to smaller, complaining men. – your Owen Wilson, Will Ferrells, or Dave Francos in videos like The Internship, Old School, and Unfinished Business, respectively, just to balance the natural order of things.
These films now tend to be described as regressive: deeply masculine efforts that reduce women to window dressing and worshipping an ignored kind of youth. I understand, to some extent, that anyone who has lived through the latter stages of Vaughn’s studio film career, films like Couples Retreat and The Dilemma, will have no problem with this description. But many of his past successes (The Break-Up and Wedding Crashers, in particular) are also prescient when it comes to masculinity in the age of fashion. They revolve around men trapped in a kind of perpetual adolescence, who find themselves at odds with worlds that seem to leave them behind.
These themes have only deepened as Vaughn enters his era as a gray-haired actor. In recent years, he has worked with S. Craig Zahler, a filmmaker drawn to grim stories about battered masculinity and white men’s rights. In Brawl in Cell Block 99 in 2017, Vaughn plays a guy forced to live a life of rebellious violence after squandering his work. In 2018’s Dragged Across Concrete, he is a suspended cop after brutally brutalizing a drug dealer. (Just to emphasize the film’s lighthearted provocations, Mel Gibson plays his sidekick. )
Both films have been described as departures for Vaughn, but they only address his interests as an actor. Vaughn’s characters don’t express as much anger at the change, but they are at least uncomfortable with the change. Sometimes they grow, become informed and improve. Other times, they don’t: they sink into resentment 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 are confined to those very libertarian concepts of self-sufficiency and personal autonomy.
Of course, you may not agree with him. But there is something undeniably compelling about an actor who has stood firmly, quietly, even ambiguously, on the margins of an industry that is largely explained through his identity politics. No wonder other people keep asking him about it.
“Bad Monkey” will premiere on Apple TV starting August 14
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Aberrant Hollywood: Vince Vaughn in his new Apple TV+ “Bad Monkey”
Hollywood Aberrant: Vince Vaughn in his new Apple TV “Bad Monkey”
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