Vincent. Anthony. Vaughn. He’s in the game.
The Wedding Crashers star’s latest gig is an especially fun and serendipitous role: Vaughn is the “voice and hero” of the Madden NFL 27 ad campaign. And the guy who once “went from the third team to the prep team” as Jamie O’Hare in Rudy (1993) perfectly quarterbacks the commercial.
Madden, EA Sports‘ signature video game, filmed this year’s ad at Halas Hall in Lake Forest, Ill., where Vaughn grew up and the Chicago Bears practice. (The NFC North team plays their home games 40 miles south at Soldier Field in Chicago.)
Vaughn is not only a big Bears fan, he’s a big Madden fan as well. To align the two, Vaughn was only needed for a day — albeit “a big, long, full shoot day,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter.
The result, a four-minute reveal trailer that will be posted in full on YouTube and dissected into 15- and 30-second increments for more traditional TV and streaming ads, is one of the best video game commercials since “Genesis Does What Nintendon’t” (1990), Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. television spot (1999), or the entire movie The Wizard (1989) starring Fred Savage. For the “It’s Your League” spot, its pitchman is in pitch-perfect Vaughn mode, and Caleb Williams, the Bears QB and Madden NFL 27 cover athlete, is one hell of a backup.
“What I liked about it is— I think we all kind of immerse ourselves in building the team and kind of creating the craziness. You are the GM, and you are the owner, and you can be the player, and you are the coach,” Vaughn said. “Leaning into that felt— in and of itself it was a fun idea, but it’s not far off, I think, from as gamers and sports fans how we approach doing it.”
Vaughn can speak for the rest of us, because he’s had more late Madden nights than most, whether that be back in the day or more recently in his kids’ treehouse. And though this marks Vaughn’s first official collab with EA, he’s acted (literally) as perhaps their best unofficial pitchman outside of Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins.
In The Breakup (2006), Vaughn trash talks his 12-year-old online opponent in Madden NFL 06 before next handing his business on the sticks in a couch competition against his ex-girlfriend’s (Jennifer Aniston) date. A decade earlier, Vaughn dominated his Swingers (1996) co-star Sue (Patrick Van Horn) in NHLPA Hockey ’93, published by Electronic Arts.
“They’ve always been nice to me,” Vaughn said of EA. “It’s part of the culture, I think, for us as guys growing up. It’s what we did. We’d get together and play these games, so [EA has] always been cool with allowing us to use it as part of a story we were telling.”
The iconic Swingers scene in particular, the one in which Vaughn’s character makes digital Wayne Gretzky’s head bleed, was (Electronic) art imitating life.
“We would get together at night after going out and order Pink Dot, and then we would play in teams of two vs. two. But whenever someone would score, you could control the instant replay, and we would do that, where you would rewind to the goal, you know, 20 times in a row. People would lose their minds, but all that stuff— a lot of that stuff came from how we actually would tease and play with each other.”
Though the goal-scoring wasn’t Vaughn so much as it was Roenick, the Gretzky cheap shot was all Vince. Given the film’s famously low budget, it was Vaughn’s personal trial-and-error that drew blood and put “The Great One” in the hospital.
“In making Gretzky’s head bleed, which was in the script, we were almost gonna give up on it until I just put it on two-player, with Gretzky sitting there, and I just kept running him,” Vaughn said. “Thankfully, I hit him. And then if you remember, they had the instant replay on the game, you could back it up, and so we were able to back it up and film it. But it 100 percent was us playing.”
Madden NFL 27 is set to release on Aug. 13; gamers who purchase special editions (like the “Deluxe” or “MVP” bundles) or subscribe to EA Play Pro can play one week prior.
The “It’s Your League” trailer was revealed Thursday evening during EA Sports’ Madden NFL 27 and College Football 27 “Opening Drive Official Reveal Event” livestream on YouTube; watch it below.
