Back in the early 1990s, when Vince Vaughn and Bill Lawrence were hungry 20-somethings trying to get a toehold in show business, they met at a regular poker game hosted by a mutual friend in Los Angeles. Vaughn had not yet made his splash in “Swingers,” or told Jon Favreau he was “so money and you don’t even know it.” Lawrence was yet to co-create “Spin City,” the ABC sitcom starring Michael J.
Fox as the quick-witted deputy mayor of New York City. “Some nights I had to decide if I was going to Subway or if it was going to be noodles in a cup,” Vaughn recalled. Lawrence, whose new series, the crime caper “ Bad Monkey ,” premieres Wednesday on Apple TV+ , and Vaughn, who stars in the series as a well-intentioned police detective who can’t get out of his own way, quickly realized they had something in common besides their mutually modest means: They both had a way with words.
A gift of gab. A talent for extending a verbal riff. In a joint video interview, Lawrence recalled the time he got up from the poker table to pay the pizza delivery man only to hear Vaughn’s voice trailing behind him: “Hey, Bill, does he have a sparkle in his eye? Ask him if he likes musical theater.
” That’s funny now largely because we can hear the words in Vaughn’s seemingly never-tired voice, a familiar sound from comedies including “Wedding Crashers,” “Old School” and “Dodgeball.” But back then, it was just a couple of poker buddies goofing off. A few years.