‘The ridiculous one’

It’s little wonder that Vince Vaughn has found so much success playing the straw that stirs the drink in so many movies about guys being guys. Less than five minutes into our interview, we’re shooting the breeze and telling stories like we’ve been hanging out for years.

The fast-talking star of “Swingers,” “Dodgeball” and the new “Wedding Crashers,” which opened Friday, asks as many questions as I do. Not only do I laugh at his jokes, he laughs at mine, even when they’re lame. That’s what guys do.

My only disappointment: He fails to call me “honey” or “baby” – though he does promise we’ll grab a cocktail the next time we’re both in Chicago, or L.A., or when he comes to visit his cousins in Michigan.

“I don’t know if I’d call myself a guy’s guy, but yeah, I got a lot of guy friends,” says Vaughn.

“And most of the people I work with, I end up staying friendly with, hanging out when we’re in the same general vicinity. I think one of the reasons you feel the thing we have in these movies is because we dig each other in real life.”

The kinship between Vaughn and “Wedding Crashers” co-star Owen Wilson is so natural that it’s something of a surprise to realize they’ve never officially been co-stars until now. Vaughn showed up only briefly in an uncredited cameo in the male-model comedy “Zoolander,” and he played the villain in last year’s big-screen version of the ‘70s TV show “Starsky & Hutch,” which had Wilson co-starring with Ben Stiller.

Still, those three – along with Wilson’s younger brother Luke, Will Ferrell and Jon Favreau – have been in so many comedies together they’ve been dubbed the Frat Pack.

Vaughn says their Sinatra is Stiller, who may soon be overtaking Kevin Bacon in the game “Six Degrees of Separation.”

“Ben cast Luke in ‘Zoolander’ and ‘Starsky’ and gave me the good guy to his bad guy in ‘Dodgeball,’ and generally fights to get the actors he likes – the people he thinks are on the same comic wavelength – in his films,” he says. “He’s Mr. Loyalty, and that’s a rare trait in this business.”

The Minneapolis native and longtime Chicagoan moved to Hollywood before he was 20, and has been acting in TV and films for 15 years; if you pay close attention you’ll spot him in 1993’s “Rudy.”

Despite surface similarities to his breakthrough role in “Swingers,” Vaughn, 35, considers “Wedding Crashers” his first bona fide “buddy comedy.”

He and Wilson play divorce negotiators who live for the spring wedding season, when they scour newspapers for large weddings that promise to bring out unattached women who just might get in the romantic mood – or consume enough alcohol – for them to take them home after the reception.

With their well-rehearsed lines and large portfolio of false identities, everything is great – until Wilson, as the more sensitive of the two, finds himself falling for one target who is not only engaged, but the daughter of a powerful U.S. Cabinet member (played by Christopher Walken).

“I had the straight-man role in ‘Dodgeball,’ so I was looking to do something to where I got to be the ridiculous one, you know, and this fit the bill pretty well, I thought,” Vaughn says.

“But what’s cool is that this is an R-rated comedy, which means we can cut loose a little more, and it has more of that ‘70s vibe, where anything can happen.

“Those were always the movies I dug the most – you know, ‘Animal House,’ ‘Stripes.’ It wasn’t about being dirty for the sake of being dirty, it was about having the freedom to go where the laughs would be. This is a movie about guys looking to score, you know, so to try to work around that would sort of miss the point.”

After test audiences enthusiastically responded, the film’s distributor, New Line, ceded to director David Dobkin’s request to forgo cutting the film to get the box-office friendlier PG-13.

Early reports seem to indicate the move will pay off; some Hollywood observers are betting that “Wedding Crashers” will end up as one of the five most popular films of the summer.

Vaughn also has a supporting role in one of the summer’s other rare hits, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” and appeared in of the year’s more notable flops, “Be Cool.”

“I don’t listen to any of that stuff,” he says of the box-office scorecards. “My job isn’t saving Hollywood, it’s just making the funniest movie I can make and doing my part the best I can do it.”

Another thing Vaughn said he wasn’t listening to last week, when this interview was conducted, were rumors that he’s romantically involved with Jennifer Aniston.

She’s his co-star in the film he’s shooting in Chicago, titled “The Break-Up.” They play a divorcing couple who are required to remain under the same roof.

“Jen and I are friends, and we like hanging out, but the rest of that stuff is just the usual bull, you know,” he said. “It’s not like it’s some anvil hanging over our heads. We’re all having a good time making the movie and not letting any of that distract us.”

But later, he was quoted in England’s Daily Mail as saying: “Put it this way, I am very, very lucky in love – I’m the luckiest guy alive at the moment. Jen is a great girl, and I am very lucky to have been able to work with her. I wouldn’t know her otherwise. Fingers crossed it works out.”