They say if you’re an early-career director, never work with animals or children. They never said anything about using two Vince Vaughns, but perhaps they should have.
“The most difficult thing about this movie was shooting two Vince Vaughns,” Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice director BenDavid Grabinski tells The National. “Luckily that worked out in my favour, but it was no easy feat.”
That challenge sits at the centre of a film that is difficult to categorise and only slightly easier to explain. Vaughn plays Nick, a hitman given the chance to return to the night his best friend died. He takes it hoping to save him, only to find himself up against an earlier version of himself.
Asked how you prepare to act opposite yourself, Vaughn's answer is brisk: “You really don’t.” What interested him more was the contrast between the two versions of the character – one older, wiser and shaped by his mistakes, the other more straightforward.
That dynamic, more than the technical gimmick of playing opposite himself, seems to have been what drew him in. Decades into his career, Vaughn is still looking for projects that feel a little unstable, “like if you’re in the ocean and your feet can’t quite touch the ground”.
The appeal here was an original film willing to move between sci-fi, action and comedy without settling too comfortably into any one of them.
Vaughn also credits Grabinski with knowing how delicate that balance was. “He wrote a script and he had a vision for it,” the actor says. There was room to improvise, he adds, but the tone itself was “very tricky, especially when you’re doing action comedy and other stuff”.
For Grabinski, Vaughn was not the actor he had originally pictured while writing. That changed as soon as the studio raised his name. The role gave Vaughn room to play several sides of himself at once – sarcastic, fast-talking, a little dangerous and unexpectedly wise – while also making use of what he calls his underrated physicality as an action performer.
That seems to have been part of the gamble of the film itself. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, which releases this weekend on Disney+ in the Middle East, has the architecture of a sci-fi conceit, the rhythms of an odd-couple comedy and, in places, the blunt force of a John Woo action film.
Grabinski says making it was a “trial by fire” in that respect. A devotee of Hong Kong action cinema, he says the film gave him his first real chance to direct action on this scale, and left him wanting to push further.
Music was part of the architecture, too. Grabinski wrote most of the needle drops directly into the script – a nostalgic tour of hits from Dave Matthews Band to Papa Roach – but had to clear two songs well in advance because they are performed on camera.
One of those sequences involves the two Vaughns singing along to Oasis’s Don’t Look Back in Anger, both loudly and horribly off-key. Perhaps enduring that was part of the difficulty.
Vaughn, for his part, talks about comedy less as a set of lines than as a matter of perspective – the ability to look back at something painful and, with enough time, laugh at it. It is an idea that also feels relevant in a film built around trying to revisit the worst night of a man’s life and somehow bend it into something absurd, sad and faintly hopeful all at once.
That comes up again when conversation turns briefly to one of the films that still follows him around. Asked whether he and Jon Favreau might ever work together again, Vaughn says there had been “a little talk” around Swingers as it approaches its 30th anniversary this year, though he stresses there is no project currently planned.
He also says an old follow-up script was “actually pretty good” and “kind of a continuation of where it was”. But what has kept Swingers alive, he says, is not just the mid-90s slang or swagger, but the fact that its themes haven't aged, even while its stars have.
“I think what makes that movie last is it’s really about friends, supporting each other through a break-up,” Vaughn says. “There’s something timeless about that, which continues on no matter what era you’re in.”
Perhaps that's why a Swingers sequel could still work, Vince suggests. Maybe, now in their 50s, the two stars could be helping each other “through divorces, right? It's over,” Vaughn says with a laugh.
It is a useful way of thinking about his work more broadly. However fast-talking or arch his characters can be, there is often something bruised underneath them – men trying to joke their way through humiliation, pain or bad decisions in real time.
Vaughn always knows how to play to his strengths. In Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, he just gets to do it twice.
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is now streaming on Disney+ in the Middle East
