Jon Favreau

I think it was Walter Matthau who said 'All you need are breaks,'" says actor/writer Jon Favreau. "One break does not make your career-but still, you better be ready for it.

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It's been four years since Favreau got his big break as both writer and star Swingers, in which he and his friend Vince Vaughn played cinematic versions of themselves: struggling actors in their 20s leading lounge-lizard lives in Hollywood. In the past four years Favreau has indeed had other breaks, although none on the scale of Swingers. The bulk of his income has come from a steady flow of screenwriting projects, plus a string of acting gigs, including Deep Impact, Very Bad Things and Showtime's Rocky Marciano. Then there's the upcoming football comedy The Replacements, which sends him out on the field alongside Keanu Reeves and Gene Hackman, who plays their coach. "We were all in training tamp, in pads, banging our heads, the whole thing," he says. "The idea being that it wouldn't be funny if the football wasn't real." Favreau will be after "realistic" comedy again when he reteams with his Swingers costar Vince Vaughn for the gang-land comedy Made, which he wrote and will direct. "The biggest compliment you can pay to a film," he asserts, "is when you turn to the guy next to you and say, 'Yeah--that's the way shit goes down.' Like The Godfather."

Anyone who was young, male, single and struggling in Hollywood in the '90s knows that Swingers is indeed the way shit went down, but it no longer represents the reality of its author's personal life. "I've been with the same woman off and on for dose to three years," he confides. Were the swinging years hard to let go of? "You're encouraged to stay adolescent in Los Angeles," he muses. "There's always a new crop of beautiful women coming in--and always a hot new place to go. As a writer and as an actor, you're encouraged to think young, because that's what sells. But people are having kids here and growing old. You just don't see them on the town anymore. They disappear into the hills, I think they know that you have to create your own world in order to mature--and grow old gracefully."

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Joshua Mooney