Vince Vaughn said he wanted to "kill off" his romantic comedy persona.
The actor, who stars in the upcoming second season of True Detective, has admitted that he got "sucked into" making more mainstream movies as his career progressed.
He told GQ magazine: ''I wanted to kill that guy off. I was very defiant right up until I did Old School. 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."
He added: "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."
