Vince Vaughn on the Real Reason He Stopped Making Comedies

During an appearance on Hot Ones, Wedding Crashers star Vince Vaughn revealed he rarely appears in comedies anymore because—according to him—Hollywood is scared of producing the raunchy R-rated fare on which he made his name.

After his debut in 1998’s Swingers, Vaughn became a consistent presence in R-rated comedies like Old School and Wedding Crashers. Those movies launched the succession of uber-raunchy, Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen-influenced “bromances” that were ubiquitous in the early aughts.

But for the best part of a decade, R-rated comedies have been few and far between. Vaughn says this is because studio executives “just overthink” everything.

“The people in charge don’t want to get fired more so than they’re looking to do something great,” he claimed, “so they want to kind of follow a set of rules that somehow get set in stone, that don’t really translate,” Vaughn continued. “But as long as they follow them, they’re not going to lose their job because they can say, ’Well, look, I made a movie off the board game Payday, so even though the movie didn’t work, you can’t let me go, right?’”

In the years since, Vaughn has segued into more dramatic roles. He played a corrupt government agent opposite Kristen Stewart in Seberg, and a gruff sergeant in Mel Gibson’s brutal war drama Hacksaw Ridge.

In 2020, Vaughn made a riotous return with Freaky, an appropriately edgy R-rated horror-comedy where he plays a murderer who swaps bodies with a teenage girl; but it made zero impact at the box office and left little impression outside of cult circles.

Despite the shifting tides of his career, and the dearth of R-rated merriment on screens, Vaughn believes there is still an appetite for raunchy comedies. “People want to laugh, people want to look at stuff that feels a little bit like it’s, you know, dangerous or pushing the envelope,” he reasoned. “I think you’re going to see more of it in the film space sooner than later, would be my guess.”

According to IMDb, Vaughn has several projects in the pipeline, two of which are comedies. However, neither sound primed for a restricted rating. One is Dodgeball 2, a sequel to the PG-13-rated 2004 original; the other, Nonnas, concerns a pizza shop run by grandmothers and is directed by Beauty and the Beast scribe Stephen Chbosky.

You can watch Vaughn's full Hot Ones appearance below.