Get comedians Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn in a room together and they get downright … serious.
Which may explain their chemistry. Vaughn, 43, speaks as he does in his movies: in rapid-fire bursts with his head cocked and his hands churning. Stiller, 46, is more likely to finish Vaughn’s sentence, ponder a question, bite his lip.
Yet they have a cadence, and they don’t joke around when it comes to joking around.
“Even when you’re doing something completely out there like Dodgeball, where you know people aren’t going to consider it a masterpiece, you still have to take it seriously as an actor,” Stiller says. “We get that in each other. Then you hope people get that in you.”
So far that hasn’t been an issue. Stiller and Vaughn combine for their fourth film, this time the alien comedy The Watch, which opens Friday.
When the two get together, success usually follows. They appeared in 2001’s Zoolander, a $28 million comedy that made $45 million at the box office. They worked together again in 2004’s Starsky & Hutch, which made $88 million. That year, they anchored Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, which became one of the year’s biggest comedies, pulling in $114 million.
USA TODAY Movies
It’s going to be a blockbuster summer. Stay up-to-date with USA TODAY Movies, featuring the latest news, reviews & coverage of all things film.
Though The Watch doesn’t share much plot DNA with Stiller and Vaughn’s earlier duets, the movie does borrow one of Dodgeball’s comedic strategies: to let the two riff off each other with cameras rolling.
For the first take, the pair, joined by Jonah Hill and Richard Ayoade, stuck largely to the script, whose writers include Seth Rogen Then director Akiva Schaffer let the group ad-lib.
“First you do the script, then you do a free one,” Vaughn says. “Some scenes went for six minutes of…
Source: USA Today
