- Mandee Johnson Photography
Baron Vaughn is a busy man.
On the day of our interview, he had just gotten back to the States after a much-needed 12-day retreat somewhere in the jungles of Mexico, with neither cell nor Twitter. He had stopped in Chicago on his way home for only a brief moment, to visit a friend and to speak with me, before returning to Los Angeles and getting back to work. In addition to his role in the new Netflix series Grace and Frankie—with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Martin Sheen—Vaughn also hosts his own podcast, Deep Shit with Baron Vaughn; co-hosts the Maltin on Movies podcast with film critic Leonard Maltin; and was recently enlisted by Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgson to voice Tom Servo in the series' forthcoming reboot. And of course there are his film cameos, club gigs, comedy album (2011's Raised by Cable); appearances on Conan, Jimmy Fallon, and Craig Ferguson; and a half-hour Comedy Central special.
So, yeah, Vaughn deserved a fucking vacation.
"When you're shooting a TV show, they ask you to be available for five months," he says. "And, within that five-month period, they don't tell you much about what you will be doing or when you will be doing it. You're basically on-call every single day, and some days you're needed and some days you're not. But you have very little notice of when that's going to be, and when that happens I don't get the chance to do stand-up on the road like I would like to."
