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"  Vince Vaughn looks a lot like Vince Vaughn, only bigger. He&amp;#039;s tall enough to have to duck through doorways, as he just did, and wide enough to spend a lot of time walking sideways through tight spaces, like this steakhouse. He wears a pair of old-school Nike sneakers that could be used as war canoes. About six and a half feet higher up, his hair rises like a wave above the low-tide beach that is his forehead. (He calls it his fivehead.) His face is full, puffy enough to make him sometimes look as though he&amp;#039;s fighting to keep his eyes open -- not as though he&amp;#039;s just woken up but as though he&amp;#039;s never bothered to go to bed in the first place. His shirt is open at the collar, probably because it has to be. It&amp;#039;s also open at the waist. Even from across this crowded restaurant, it&amp;#039;s possible to see a jumbo slice of Vaughn&amp;#039;s naked belly. It&amp;#039;s too much to ignore, this great golden acreage, because he leads with it and because it&amp;#039;s probably been kissed by Jennifer Aniston, standing on her tippy-toes. The man doesn&amp;#039;t just occupy airspace; he fills it.  Like many giants, Vaughn gave up trying to hide a long time ago. (He&amp;#039;s a regular at this restaurant, a touristy joint on the busiest stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, and he&amp;#039;s fine with the table in the center of the room, surrounded.) Unlike most big men, however, his stature doesn&amp;#039;t offer him any protection, leaving him twice defenseless, omnipresent without being ominous: Nobody&amp;#039;s scared of Vince Vaughn. He sits down and almost immediately people come to spend time in his shadow, beating even the waiter. The first is a kind of Gothic-looking girl, a photographer who delivers her pitch in a disturbing monotone: &amp;quot;I never come up to people like this, but I would love to take your picture,&amp;quot; she says, her eyes staring hard into his. She hands him her business card, which disappears inside his paw. &amp;quot;Okay, sure, thanks, that&amp;#039;s really cool,&amp;quot; Vaughn says before she melts away, because he&amp;#039;s midwestern and good with people and refreshingly aware that his job carries certain responsibilities. (&amp;quot;I like talking to people,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I really do. They&amp;#039;re usually very nice to me.&amp;quot;) It&amp;#039;s only later, thinking back about the photographer, that he says, &amp;quot;Did she think I would say yes? Like that&amp;#039;s something I might do? Yes! Terrific! Let me come to your loft so you can take pictures of me tied up on the bed.&amp;quot; But that&amp;#039;s Vince Vaughn&amp;#039;s trick. If, in our imaginations, there really were a star who might do that -- if the public were surveyed about which actor was most likely to end up in some stranger&amp;#039;s house after a night on the town, rummaging through the fridge and playing Wii Tennis for all his life -- Vaughn would be him. Most people who saw him in Old School or Wedding Crashers or Dodgeball -- most of the people in this restaurant, including the housewife who told him not to be scared when she leaned in and the guy out in the parking lot who clapped him on the shoulder like an old friend -- probably caught themselves thinking, That guy&amp;#039;s just a regular guy. That guy&amp;#039;s just like me. The truth is, Vince Vaughn isn&amp;#039;t really like them. He&amp;#039;s the biggest man in the room. And because of his size, and because he inherited from his salesman father a competitive streak as well as a knack for volume business, he is voracious in his appetites (steak and lobster and creamed spinach) and his desires (to be loved). He has an almost pathological need to please his public. He wants you to hear his name and smile as though by instinct; he wants you to see his face and laugh and not even know why. He wants you to see him everywhere you look and in the very next second to see in him whatever it is you want to see.   He&amp;#039;s just opened his own factory. It&amp;#039;s uncharacteristically inconspicuous, a low-rise lost among the transmission shops and burger joints just south of Hollywood. Only the parking lot out back betrays that something mountainous might be going on inside. There is a collection of big, expensive cars and a basketball hoop.  Vaughn is waiting for Jon Favreau to show up. They have been friends since meeting as actors on the set of Rudy fifteen years ago; by their collective force of will, they appeared together again in Swingers, the low-budget, vaguely autobiographical, smart, and funny film that Favreau wrote and Vaughn stole. Swingers was Vaughn&amp;#039;s first real foray into the public consciousness. It was more than just a starring turn. Everywhere he went, he heard his catchphrases shouted back at him. He was on his way to becoming ubiquitous. Today, Favreau and Vaughn are working together on a new script, one of the first projects housed here at Vaughn&amp;#039;s nascent production company, Wild West Picture Show Productions. It&amp;#039;s a comedy called Couples Retreat. It was Vaughn&amp;#039;s idea. Had it been anybody else&amp;#039;s, it probably would have been waved away like a fart, but because Vaughn wants to be loved, people want to love him back. They give him chances. It&amp;#039;s about four couples who enter couples therapy on a tropical island. Who knows? Maybe it will be good after all. Favreau, fresh from the grand success of directing Iron Man, is writing the script, and every now and then, on days like today, they get together to bounce ideas off each other&amp;#039;s backboards. In the meantime, Vaughn has banked his second holiday movie, Four Christmases with Reese Witherspoon -- because who can hate Christmas? -- and he and his staff have been putting the finishing touches on a documentary, as yet untitled, that sounds fantastic. A few years ago, Vaughn was traveling around Ireland with a friend when they found their way into troubled Belfast. It is a city with a lot of walls, most of which have been covered with murals, lamentations for what might have been and what once was. Visitors can tour them in the back of a black taxi, one of Belfast&amp;#039;s few symbols of neutrality. Folded into the jump seat, lowering his head to window height, Vaughn saw the murals rise up like great ghosts in front of him, the centuries of war between Irish Protestants and Catholics captured in paint. He was enraptured. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re beautiful,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;but they come out of such conflict. It&amp;#039;s almost like blues music here. And what&amp;#039;s most interesting to me is, there are walls that divide these neighborhoods, but from inside the taxi, they look identical. There&amp;#039;s no way to tell them apart.&amp;quot;  When Vaughn starts talking about the documentary, it feels like an elaborate setup for a joke, the build toward some improbable punch line. Because this is what we&amp;#039;ve come to expect from him: He is the clown. Only occasionally does he bristle at the label, because he is smart enough to know that it has served him well. (Earlier this year, Forbes ranked him as the best investment in the business, garnering more than fourteen dollars at the box office for every dollar he&amp;#039;s paid.) But he would like to remind you, gently, that those same smarts compelled him to cold-shoulder most of the commercial films he was offered after Swingers. Instead, he chose to appear in a succession of smaller, darker movies with forgotten titles: A Cool, Dry Place and Clay Pigeons and Return to Paradise. Reprising the character of Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant&amp;#039;s remake of Psycho nearly buried Vaughn under a reputation for playing malcontents and killers. &amp;quot;When Old School came about,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;it was really very difficult for me to get a role in that movie, because no one saw me as a comic actor.&amp;quot; Other happy, lucrative jaunts followed, and now few people -- despite his memorable turn in Into the Wild -- can see him as anything but. So when he talks about his documentary on the murals of Belfast, about death and beauty and art and bombs and what makes us the same and what makes us different, you almost expect him to say, &amp;quot;Just kidding,&amp;quot; and drop his pants. Isn&amp;#039;t this the guy who was paid $20 million to make Fred Claus?  Maybe Belfast grabbed such a strong hold on him because of his struggles to hold his own opposites together. Or maybe it&amp;#039;s because he was raised in a divided city himself: Chicago. He&amp;#039;s asked the question that all Chicago natives must answer in their hearts shortly after they take their first breath, coloring their fates and their futures for the rest of their lives. It&amp;#039;s the question that answers every other question: Cubs or White Sox? &amp;quot;I root for both teams,&amp;quot; Vaughn says. You can&amp;#039;t root for both teams. &amp;quot;I really do.&amp;quot; No. You can&amp;#039;t. He looks genuinely perplexed. &amp;quot;But...&amp;quot; No buts. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a Cubs fan,&amp;quot; he says, finally and a little sadly, because that&amp;#039;s a hard thing to admit. &amp;quot;As a kid, the Cubs were my team.&amp;quot; Now we&amp;#039;re getting --  &amp;quot;That being said, when the White Sox won the World Series, I was rooting for them the whole way. I go to Comiskey Park, and I root for them against anyone in the American League and anyone in the National League except for the Cubs. And a lot of Sox fans don&amp;#039;t respect that. And the same with Cubs fans. They think you have to root for one or the other.&amp;quot; They think that because you do. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve always rooted for both,&amp;quot; he says, raising his hands, I don&amp;#039;t know what to tell you. &amp;quot;Because I love Chicago most of all.&amp;quot; He sinks deeper into the couch, exhausted by his lies. Only seconds later, he pops back up, looking as though he realizes he&amp;#039;s made a terrible mistake. &amp;quot;I love Los Angeles, too,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t own a house here right now. I own a place in Chicago. But I consider Los Angeles home as well -- I moved here when I was eighteen years old, and this city&amp;#039;s been very good to me. So many great neighborhoods....I might get a place here at some point. I spend a lot of time here, and I do like it. I like it a lot. I love it, actually. It&amp;#039;s just that Chicago&amp;#039;s where I&amp;#039;m from, you know what I mean? That&amp;#039;s all it is.&amp;quot;  It turns out, it&amp;#039;s a lot of work being Vince Vaughn. There are a lot of plates to spin. Friends say that Vaughn is surprisingly political, routinely firing off opinionated riffs on world events. (Apparently his impassioned take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like listening to Khrushchev banging his shoe on the podium.) But those are private sessions, his few remaining dramatic outlets. The public Vaughn, the professional Vaughn, is the man in the middle, afraid to give anyone a reason not to like him. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not running for office,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I just want people to come to my stuff and escape and see me as a character, not as anything else.&amp;quot; Seeing him here just now, his legs stretched like bridges across to the coffee table, the light catching the worry lines and lumps on his face, you get the feeling that even in Belfast Vaughn would always find a way to be the black taxi. McCain or Obama? &amp;quot;Not a chance,&amp;quot; Vaughn says, and he jumps out the window.  There is only one question that Vaughn will answer without reservation. He answered it the night before, at the steakhouse, underscoring every elaborately constructed sentence, paragraph, and punctuation mark with a forkful of lobster meat, flashing across the table like a rapier. It was as though Vince Vaughn from the movies suddenly showed up, goofy and motormouthed and frantic, a machine with its own built-in momentum. What&amp;#039;s funny? &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s when you have an insight that people can relate to, but you have a perspective that maybe they haven&amp;#039;t thought of -- that can be funny. If I&amp;#039;m saying a universal truth, but maybe it&amp;#039;s something that people don&amp;#039;t feel comfortable saying....It&amp;#039;s a strange take, but at the same time, what you&amp;#039;re hitting on is kind of right. You can relate. That&amp;#039;s the heart of comedy. You have to have a point of view. You gotta commit. And the more you commit to it, sometimes the funnier it gets. Like in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I&amp;#039;m convinced that something&amp;#039;s going to go down.&amp;quot; Vaughn starts looking around the restaurant, jittery and bug-eyed, seeing imaginary vampire bats swooping down from the rafters. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s crazy, but the more I&amp;#039;m past questioning it, the funnier it is. Or in Swingers, I make such a big deal over how many days you have to wait before you call a girl. I think it&amp;#039;s funny because I&amp;#039;m so particular, as though it really means the world to me. I have friends in real life, the way they see stuff, they can be so narrow in their perspective, it makes me laugh. You could have a friend who&amp;#039;s dating someone and he can get hung up on the smallest thing. It&amp;#039;s like...&amp;quot; And here Vaughn starts shouting, hitting the table, and the people in the restaurant who&amp;#039;ve been pretending not to look at him stop pretending. &amp;quot;She wrote me an e-mail! At the end of that e-mail it says, dot dot dot. What does that mean? No, no, seriously, if that was a period, that would be the end of the sentence. There&amp;#039;s closure. Dot dot dot, there&amp;#039;s no closure!&amp;quot; He shrinks back down.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s that kind of commitment that makes it sort of funny. If I take an extreme, absolute position, that becomes funny. Because the reaction doesn&amp;#039;t warrant the reality. It&amp;#039;s just dot dot dot.&amp;quot; He swells up and starts shouting again. &amp;quot;Dot dot dot? Who does she think she is? She&amp;#039;s fronting on me! She thinks she&amp;#039;s going to get one over on me? I&amp;#039;m going to call her sister. Because I&amp;#039;m not here to get played, dog.&amp;quot; Now with his hands up, in a calmer voice: &amp;quot;Slow down, man, it&amp;#039;s just dot dot dot. It&amp;#039;s just, like, to be continued. &amp;quot;WHAT&amp;#039;S TO BE CONTINUED?!&amp;quot; The timing, the delivery, the sheer size of his performance, they make the words so much funnier than they are -- he&amp;#039;s done what he has done so often before, taken mediocre material and given it a blast with cardiac paddles -- and people in the restaurant are really laughing hard now, heads on their empty plates, tears in their eyes. Vaughn sits back, picks up his drink, surveys his audience, and he smiles that really nice smile of his. He&amp;#039;s loving this. He&amp;#039;s loving that we&amp;#039;ve fallen in love.  Favreau shows up and Vaughn makes room for him on the couch. He&amp;#039;s just wearing a T-shirt and jeans, sucking on a mint for lunch, ready to go to work. It&amp;#039;s funny seeing them like this, the two guys from Swingers at their ten-year reunion, a little older, a little fatter, a little tired-seeming and wrung out. Their lives have gone in different directions since then, in exactly the directions you might have expected watching them play themselves in that film: Favreau, at forty-two, is more serious-minded and restrained, with a house and a wife and three kids. Vaughn, now thirty-eight, is like that guy still sleeping on a water bed in the room above the garage. In their more honest moments, they probably look at each other and envy what the other has, but despite Vaughn&amp;#039;s valiant stab at never being entirely one thing or the other, there are some parts of a man&amp;#039;s life where you can&amp;#039;t have it both ways. It&amp;#039;s one or the other. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re like the Sunshine Boys,&amp;quot; Favreau says. &amp;quot;Did you ever see that? He&amp;#039;s Walter Matthau.&amp;quot; Favreau looks at Vaughn. &amp;quot;Or maybe you&amp;#039;re George Burns.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Jon&amp;#039;s my favorite writer,&amp;quot; Vaughn says. &amp;quot;Even collaborating now with Couples Retreat, my job is just to help shape it. He&amp;#039;s really the guy writing it.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But Vince was smart enough to say, Hey, I&amp;#039;m at this point in my career, instead of just fielding gigs, let me generate my own material. It was about a year and a half ago, after the Spike Awards --&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The Mantlers,&amp;quot; Vaughn says. &amp;quot;We won this award --&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The Golden Mantlers.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We were inducted into the Guys Hall of Fame. So we went to the Dresden of all places, where we hadn&amp;#039;t been in years, and Vince laid out what he was going to do with Wild West and some of the ideas he wanted to pursue. He mentioned Couples Retreat. And I have a perspective on that, being married with three kids...&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Are you done having kids?&amp;quot; Vaughn asks. &amp;quot;Yeah, I&amp;#039;m done.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re not going to pull the goalie ever again?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No. Joy says, &amp;#039;It&amp;#039;s wife number two if you want more kids.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; &amp;quot;Then you would have to move to, like, some Islamic country where you could have another wife,&amp;quot; Vaughn says. &amp;quot;Or nowhere. I could do the Hollywood thing, just hit reset.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Or you could move into Warren Jeffs territory.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I could set up a compound?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; Vaughn says, &amp;quot;a compound. That was so disturbing. You see all these little girls who look like extras from Little House on the Prairie. It&amp;#039;s like Half Pint&amp;#039;s been putting out for everybody....&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Polygamy seems appealing,&amp;quot; Favreau says, &amp;quot;but then I&amp;#039;ve been watching that show Big Love, and you realize it&amp;#039;s the same headaches.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s triple the headaches. Triple the nagging. Triple the question, What are you thinking?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah, one marriage is enough,&amp;quot; Favreau says. &amp;quot;You have to pick out three sets of blinds.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Anyway,&amp;quot; Favreau says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m in that place, coming from that perspective now. I couldn&amp;#039;t write something like Swingers today, because I&amp;#039;m so far out of that.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, you have a good imagination,&amp;quot; Vaughn says. &amp;quot;No, Swingers, a lot of that stuff was stuff you&amp;#039;d said or stuff I&amp;#039;d heard about, and it gives you a personal take on the stuff. When I write, I need that.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It blows my mind, seeing where Favs has gone with his career,&amp;quot; Vaughn says. &amp;quot;I mean, Iron Man? Are you kidding? That&amp;#039;s incredible to me, thinking about us not that long ago, sitting at the diner, trying to figure out how to get the money to make Swingers.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Now that we both can make movies more easily,&amp;quot; Favreau says, &amp;quot;the hard part is, What movies do I want to make? What means something to me? The challenges have changed. It&amp;#039;s a lot different for us now. It&amp;#039;s like being a short-order cook instead of being a chef, when you could pay such close attention to every part of the process. How do you bring that same quality when people are lined up around the block waiting for you to serve something up?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s well said,&amp;quot; Vaughn says. &amp;quot;Before, we had all the time in the world....&amp;quot; And as Favreau continues to talk -- Jon Favreau is smart as hell, by the way; he should charge admission to watch him change a diaper -- Vaughn continues to listen. Not just casually. He&amp;#039;s really listening, as though someone&amp;#039;s grabbed him by the shoulders. &amp;quot;...it&amp;#039;s important to remind each other who we are and what we like...&amp;quot; Vaughn, who&amp;#039;s hardly ever quiet, stays quiet, and a look crosses his face. It&amp;#039;s not wonder. It&amp;#039;s more like revelation. Favreau keeps talking: &amp;quot;...you&amp;#039;re either selling or you&amp;#039;re buying...&amp;quot; And Vaughn keeps listening, because now it feels as though Favreau is talking directly to him, as though there is nobody else in the room. Here are two friends, magnetic poles, sitting on opposite ends of the same couch: the one who&amp;#039;s grown up and the one who&amp;#039;s refused to settle down; the one who takes risks -- because Iron Man could have destroyed Jon Favreau, that could have been the end of him right there -- and the one who returns to the same well; the one who commits and the one who lies awake at night worried that someone might think ill of him. While their world is easier now than ever in some ways, it&amp;#039;s harder, too. Sometimes they must feel split in two. Vince Vaughn has money, he has fame, he has power. He has the love he&amp;#039;s always gone after. But what&amp;#039;s he going to do with it? &amp;quot;...that ray of clarity...&amp;quot; And just then, Vince Vaughn looks the way a big man looks when someone stands up to him for the first time in his life. He looks like a man who knows that he can cover only so much ground, that even giants have their limits. He looks like a man who knows he will have to pick a side. He looks suddenly smaller. He still looks a lot like Vince Vaughn, only built to scale. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a5285/vince-vaughn-1208/>