Vince Vaughn

Info

Full Name: Vince Vaughn
Date of birth: March 28, 1970 (56 years old)
Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Country: USA
Height: 1,96m

Vince Vaughn has been active for 35 years, participating in 36 movies that average a 6.1/10 score.

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Biography

"You're so money and you don't even know it." Vince Vaughn says that line to Jon Favreau in 'Swingers', a 1996 film about four out-of-work actors doing the rounds of Los Angeles bars. It cost $250,000, Doug Liman directed it and Favreau wrote it about people more or less like themselves. Vaughn played Trent, the friend whose confidence is entirely unearned, and within a year an actor nobody was calling had turned into one everybody wanted.

A kid from Lake Forest

He was born in Minneapolis on 28 March 1970 but grew up in Illinois, first in Buffalo Grove and from the age of eight in Lake Forest, a comfortable suburb north of Chicago. His father sold toys for a living and his mother worked as an estate agent and stockbroker. He's the youngest of three, with two older sisters, Victoria and Valeri.

School was a slog. He has talked openly about his dyslexia and his trouble concentrating, and about how much he hated being pulled out of class every day for a special session. His fix was to join every sports team going so nobody would notice. At seventeen he decided he wanted to act, and he credits his mother's stubbornness with teaching him that hard work at least buys you a chance.

He shot a Chevrolet advert in 1988, moved to Los Angeles and picked up small television parts. On 'Rudy' (1993) he met another first-timer called Jon Favreau. They became friends, and three years later Favreau wrote the film that changed both their lives.

Dinosaurs, Norman Bates and a couple of stumbles

Steven Spielberg hired him almost immediately as the photographer Nick Van Owen in 'The Lost World: Jurassic Park' (1997), which dropped him straight into the big-budget league. The thriller 'Return to Paradise' (1998) and 'The Cell' (2000), opposite Jennifer Lopez, followed.

The strangest job of those years was stepping into Norman Bates. Gus Van Sant set out to remake 'Psycho' (1998) shot for shot, and it fell to Vaughn to fill Anthony Perkins's shoes. It didn't work, and the reviews were brutal. He was soon sending himself up as Ben Stiller's brother in 'Zoolander' (2001).

The Frat Pack decade

His second life started with 'Old School' (2003), starting a fraternity alongside Will Ferrell and Luke Wilson. That part set the template for the next ten years: talking very fast, never pausing for breath, radiating a confidence with nothing underneath it. In 2004 alone he did 'Starsky & Hutch', 'Dodgeball' and Wes Mantooth in 'Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy'.

The big one came in 2005 with 'Wedding Crashers', gatecrashing other people's receptions with Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams. It cleared $200 million in the United States alone and made him a name above the title. He turned up that same year in 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith' and 'Be Cool'.

The press lumped them all together as the Frat Pack, with Ferrell, Ben Stiller and the Wilson brothers. Vaughn worked that stretch harder than most: 'The Break-Up' (2006) with Jennifer Aniston, whom he dated during that shoot and into the following year; 'Fred Claus' (2007); 'Four Christmases' (2008) with Reese Witherspoon; and 'Couples Retreat' (2009), which he co-wrote and produced as well.

One job in the middle of all that served as a reminder he could do something else. In Sean Penn's 'Into the Wild' (2007) he played the man who takes in a drifting young traveller in South Dakota, and it's a small, warm piece of work.

The dramatic turn

In 2015 he went after serious television with the second season of 'True Detective', playing the gangster Frank Semyon opposite Colin Farrell. Critics savaged that run, though by then Vaughn had worked out which direction he wanted. The following year he was the drill sergeant in Mel Gibson's 'Hacksaw Ridge' (2016).

The man who actually turned his career around was S. Craig Zahler. For 'Brawl in Cell Block 99' (2017) he shaved his head, bulked up and dealt out a dry, unshowy violence nobody saw coming from him. They went again on 'Dragged Across Concrete' (2018). Then he had a great deal of fun in 'Freaky' (2020), playing a teenage girl stuck inside a serial killer's body.

His best recent run is on television. Since 2024 he has led 'Bad Monkey', Apple's adaptation of the Carl Hiaasen novels, as Andrew Yancy, an ex-Miami detective demoted to restaurant inspector in Key West. Season two arrives on 2 December 2026 with John Malkovich joining the cast. Along the way he appeared in 'IF' (2024) and led Netflix's 'Nonnas' (2025), which pulled 33 million views in ten days.

Next up are 'Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice', with James Marsden and Eiza González, and a third film for Zahler, 'The Bookie & The Bruiser', this time opposite Adrien Brody.

Off screen he keeps things quiet for a man who stands 6ft 5in. He met the Canadian Kyla Weber at a wedding in 2008, married her in Lake Forest in January 2010 and they have two children, Locklyn and Vernon. He's a committed Chicago Bears fan, holds a blue belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and in August 2024 collected the 2,786th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame with the whole family watching.