Vince Vaughn is calling out what he believes is the Hollywood mindset of “‘We’re smart and got it figured out. And if you don’t agree, then you’re an idiot.'”
“You can be like ‘I feel strong about this,’ but it’s a strange thing when you start going like, you know better than someone. That’s when it gets weird,” the “Wedding Crashers” star told Theo Von on the “This Past Weekend” podcast on Tuesday. “It’s one thing to say ‘This is where I’m at. And then here’s someone else’s point of view. Disagree or agree.’ It’s another thing to be like, ‘I’m so right, and I’m going to help you or condescend to you’… I mean, no one wants to hang out with that.”
He also said the industry has put itself in a corner attempting to “please everybody.”
“I do think that there’s less control in some ways, but I also think that they put themselves in a corner with trying to please everybody,” he said.
Unlike the industry as a whole, he said he was always able to joke around among his comedian friends.
“People my age, we disagree, agree, we’d change our minds, we’d laugh, we joke,” he explained. “But there was definitely a culture that if you didn’t agree with these ideas, you were looked at as bad for sure.”
He also said he doesn’t think stars have become more political recently, but rather “they got rewarded for it.”
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“They started to come out there and do it and I don’t even know how much everyone even is informed on everything, but they really like to get out there and do it,” he said, adding, “And they’re hypocrites, too, a lot of times, like anybody is.”
He said it’s also a problem when people don’t think for themselves, likening the issue to Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz.”
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“That’s the problem if you’re going through life trying to check boxes like Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ Like, ‘let me get the broom. Let me do this. What is the wizard?’ You’re not thinking for yourself. You’re just trying to do the things you’re supposed to.”
Vaughn added, “It’s always better if you get quiet and do what’s in your heart and do what you think is right. That’s when you carve out stuff and make your own path… and have the courage, I think, to be honest.”
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The comedian mused that’s what went wrong with feature comedies.
“And that’s why I think stand-up got stronger,” he said, adding that it “was easier to give someone money for a special and say ‘We’re going to not — that’s their special,’ but the studios weren’t going to produce a comedy [movie] and be more responsible for supporting the making of that film.”
“But the truth is, most people, they want to laugh,” he said. “They don’t want to see stuff be precious that you can’t talk or joke about. Most people can make fun of themselves.”
In the real world, Vaughn said, it’s a “lonely experience” if people can’t make fun of themselves.
“You know, you got to be able to laugh at yourself,” he continued. “You can look back at stuff that you believed so strongly a few years ago and laugh about it. So, I think you got to have that quality, and comedy is that — being able to laugh at stuff.”
But, he said, it became easier in the industry to say, “‘OK, well, we’re gonna just have a stand-up [comedian] and that’s their point of view’ than it was to — they got too complicated not to offend anybody with going and making a movie. They were trying so hard not to offend anybody.”
