Delivery Man's Vince Vaughn hopes to turn comedy flops around Trailer: Delivery Man An affable underachiever finds out he's fathered 533 children through anonymous donations to a fertility clinic 20 years ago. PT2M31S http://www.smh.com.au/action/externalEmbeddedPlayer?id=d-2yq6m 620 349 December 4, 2013 Delivery Man star Vince Vaughn is dispensing marriage advice, but what's most surprising is that it's actually quite sage. "You've got to take time away from the kids, to have time for the two of you, even if it's just for one night," insists the man famous for playing immature jerks in films such as Old School, The Wedding Crashers and Anchorman. It's great to spend time with your family and I love having princess tea parties with my daughter, but it's also really important to spend time on your marriage. The 43-year-old actor has bonded with me over my confession that both he and my husband were 40 when they met their spouses and became parents. "A reverse midlife crisis," he laughs. Fatherly advice: Vince Vaughn in Delivery Man. After his year-long relationship with actress Jennifer Aniston ended in 2006, Vaughn met Canadian real estate agent Kyla Weber in 2009 and the couple have two children, daughter Locklyn, 3, and baby son Vernon, three months. "There was something in my generation where we were told, 'Don't get married young, focus on your career', and we all did that," the 1.96-metre-tall actor says as he sprawls out on a couch in a Beverly Hills hotel suite to talk about his new comedy. Then you wake up at 30-something and go, 'Gosh, who am I going to meet? I haven't focused on that at all'. In Delivery Man, Vaughn plays David Wozniak, a driver for his family's meat company who is in serious debt and in desperate need of direction in his life. When he finds out he is the biological father of 533 children, and 142 of them are suing a sperm bank to learn his identity, he is faced with a big decision. At the same time, he's trying to convince his long-suffering girlfriend, Emma (Cobie Smulders), he will grow up and be responsible for the child they are expecting. The film is a retelling of the 2011 French-Canadian comedy Starbuck, also written and directed by this film's writer/director Ken Scott. "This was a unique performance for me, a return to Swingers or other stuff I did earlier, because this was very grounded," Vaughn says. So many films can only be comedic, with the one scene that has a heart, or dramatic, with a few jokes. But what's fun about this film is it's a lot of extreme emotions under one umbrella. Growing up in Chicago, Vaughn was raised in a working-class household with no relationship to the entertainment industry. One grandfather was a dairy farmer and my other grandfather was an immigrant. But my connection was that my parents really loved movies and as a kid I remember even if the Wizard of Oz or Sound of Music came on, all the kids would sit around the TV and it would be an event," he says. During the summer, my parents would put me in various camps while they were both working. One of them was acting, which was when I first discovered I really loved storytelling. After finishing high school, Vaughn was cast in a car commercial and promptly moved to Los Angeles, where he endured some tough years of rejection before he was cast in his friend Jon Favreau's comedy Swingers, which was loosely inspired by their real-life adventures as unemployed actors. The film was a surprise hit and led to more dramatic films, including The Lost World: Jurassic Park, The Locusts and a 1998 Gus Van Sant remake of Psycho, in which he played Norman Bates. After the raunchy comedy Wedding Crashers became a hit in 2005, Vaughn shifted into comedy, but only delivered a string of flops, including Fred Claus, The Dilemma and Couples Retreat. He agrees when I say Delivery Man has a charm and heartfelt humour missing from many of those films. "The agents I was with at the time, all they represented were comedy people," he bluntly explains. I think that was all they knew, so they kind of pushed me in that direction. What happens is you start getting paid more and then the studio starts saying, 'How can we make this more fun for everybody and give it a PG-13 rating' and you find yourself in these movies that may not have been your initial taste or instinct. Vaughn admits he was also uncomfortable with his personal life being under so much scrutiny at that time, when he made the 2006 comedy, The Break-Up, with Aniston. "If you date someone well-known, it brings all that stuff to you," he says with a sigh. But I always did a good job prior to and after of avoiding that type of stuff. Marriage and children came late, Vaughn admits, but he has finally learnt to embrace growing up on and off screen. I remember when my hair started to turn a little grey and my mom told me she could get this stuff to darken. I think we left it on for about five minutes too long and I looked like Adam Ant or Roy Orbison," he says with a laugh. Now I don't do that at all. I'm glad I'm finally allowing myself to go through the stages you go through in life without pretending. Delivery Man is now in cinemas.