9 Times That Comedy Actors Failed At Serious Roles

9) Vince Vaughn – True Detective

Kicking off with the most recent example of a comedy star failing to prove his serious credentials, it’s Owen Wilson’s occasional on-screen sidekick Vince Vaughn, mangling dialogue, and acting stiff and morose like it’s going out of style. To be fair to Vaughn, he was lumped with the worst of showrunner-writer Nic Pizzolatto’s lines in the second season of True Detective, but he still seemed a bit in over his head.

The way Vaughn plays gangster Frank Semyon – with an apparent determination to put you to sleep through his flatness – also doesn’t help. This is a case of a bad character on the page being compounded by an actor playing it beyond understated, and into dry and uninteresting.

Still, Vaughn’s apparent bid for late-career dramatic stardom appears to have worked all the same, as Mel Gibson’s just cast him in his war movie Hacksaw Ridge. Which means Gibbo probably never saw this gif.