Vince Vaughn wanted to "kill off" his romantic comedy persona.
The 45-year-old actor enjoyed working on "smart and cool" comedies, but admits as his career progressed, he got "sucked into" more mainstream movies.
He said: "I wanted to kill that guy off. I was very defiant right up until I did ‘Old School’ [in 2003].
"Things like ‘Dodgeball’ and ‘Wedding Crashers’, these things were smart and cool. I thought they were badass. And the characters were appealing.
"It felt like we were kind of doing rock’n’roll back then. I felt good about those movies.
"It was after I had written ‘Couples Retreat’ and I wanted to bring that character as far as I could, bring him to his knees and then knock the romantic comedies on the head.
"[But] you kind of get sucked onto a sort of conveyer belt. It’s the cliché but it’s true. I started doing what I would call assembly line comedies where there wasn’t a filmmaker or someone like Jon Favreau whom I could bounce off."
And the ‘True Detective’ star takes full responsibility for getting "idle" with his career.
He added to Britain’s GQ magazine: "I’m not blaming anyone else but myself here. The machine can make you idle. You read a script and then you agree to a role, then soon enough you’re on set looking at a scene that has had all the juice and the life sucked right out of it.
"You become a hired gun doing a very inoffensive PG-13 movie and, well, you kind of just go along with it. Like anything in life you’re either growing or you’re dying. When you get too comfortable you start to decline."
Vince Vaughn got ‘sucked into’ rom-coms
