When Steve Buscemi got stabbed in a barroom brawl that landed Vince Vaughn in jail
We’ve all been there, drunk in a bar with Vince Vaughn, too hazy to realise that the locals are getting agitated.
Then some literal knives come out, and that’s when things start to become very tabloid-y, which is apparently a familiar story, and one that Steve Buscemi found himself embroiled in thanks to, well, alcohol and Vaughn.
It all started when the actors were more or less minding their own business in North Carolina, Wilmington, a small city known for a 1898 massacre in which a group of white supremacists staged a coup against the local government and killed up to 300 people.
They were shooting a film titled (and this is true) Domestic Disturbance, which follows a divorced dad played by John Travolta who is convinced that his ex-wife’s new partner, played by Vaughn, is actually a murderer. It’s an overwrought and obtuse film, but it isn’t so terrible that the actors involved deserved to be attacked for it, and if violence is to be the answer, then Battlefield Earth would surely have been a more galvanising offence.
So there they were, Vaughn, Buscemi, and screenwriter Scott Rosenberg, sitting in a bar in the same town, presumably trying to enjoy their cursed surroundings. According to various sources, things kicked off when a local woman approached Vaughn and began chatting with him.
Unfortunately, the woman had a boyfriend who wasn’t thrilled about being upstaged by a relatively famous creature of Hollywood, and thus enlisted one of his cronies to show the actor who was boss, wherein a fight ensued, knives were drawn, words were said (probably not in that order), and Buscemi got slashed in the face, neck, and arm.
The police managed to break up that skirmish and arrest the 21-year-old assailant, but while he was being handcuffed, another fight broke out in which Vaughn was maced, resulting in him, Rosenberg, and two local men being hauled to jail before being released on bond. The man wielding the knife was charged with assault with a deadly weapon with the intent to kill, and for his part, the bleeding Buscemi was hospitalised and avoided time behind bars; while all of this is much more intriguing than anything in the film itself, sadly, it also had real-world consequences.
Buscemi went home to New York to recover from the attack and sought deliverance from a plastic surgeon, who mercifully was up to the task, but when asked about it later in an interview with Playboy, he owned his own part in the episode, admitting, “Too much alcohol got consumed that night, by everybody, me included. They were local people; we were outsiders”. He didn’t remember how the whole thing started, but he was clear about why it happened, saying, “If I hadn’t been drinking, I would not have gotten into any trouble”.
Vaughn and Rosenberg were unharmed, but a judge banned them from entering any more bars in Wilmington (which was probably more of a blessing) and instructed them to attend alcohol counselling; the big winner to come out of this unscathed, of course, was John Travolta.
