Adam Sandler recently opened up about what it’s like working alongside his daughters, Sadie, 19, and Sunny, 16, sharing just how meaningful the experience is for him as both a father and a performer.
In a conversation with E! News, the comedy star said the feeling that takes over is mostly one of relief.
“Oh my god, you’re just relieved. Once they do it well, nothing feels better as a parent,” Sandler shared about seeing his daughters perform.
“It must be like when you’re the parents of a baseball player and you’re at the game and they get a hit. You just go, ‘Thank god.’ It’s just so much relief.”
Sadie and Sunny appear in Happy Gilmore 2, adding a new layer of joy to Sandler’s work, who has long been known for bringing family and close friends into his films.
He has often spoken about how much his daughters mean to him, and in a past interview with PEOPLE, he shared how they’re just as invested in his well-being offscreen.
“They always look out for me and my health just like I used to with my dad,” he said at the Adam Sandler: Love You premiere in New York City last August.
“You go, ‘Man, I want this guy around,’ so I used to scream at my dad to quit smoking, and my kids scream at me to just calm down and try to eat a little more like a normal person.”
But while Sandler finds comfort and pride in working with his daughters, other actors have had very different, and sometimes “intense”, experiences working with him.
Comedian Bobby Lee recently recalled a challenging moment on the set of the 2020 Netflix film The Wrong Missy, where Sandler served as a producer.
Lee had only one line in the film, “Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Morris”, but that brief moment turned into a stressful shoot.
Talking about it on David Spade and Dana Carvey’s podcast Fly on the Wall, Lee described how Sandler’s sudden appearance on set made things tense.
“I’m on set, feeling good. It’s outside. Hawaii!” Lee said. “Everyone on that set is a friend of mine. ‘Action.'”
But then, unexpectedly, he heard a voice shout from video village, “Stop!” It was Sandler.
“It’s Sandler. Who never comes [to set],” Lee explained. “He comes down and he goes, ‘Hey — what are you doing?’ And I go, ‘Oh hey, Adam!’ He goes, ‘What are you doing?'”
According to Lee, Sandler didn’t feel the delivery was natural enough. “He goes, ‘It’s more natural. Do it more natural,'” he remembered. “So I go, ‘Okay.’ ‘Action’ again. I do it again. ‘Stop!’ He comes back.”
David Spade, who starred in the film alongside Lauren Lapkus, recalled the awkward moment too.
“Me and Lauren start laughing, because it’s so tense and weird,” he said.
“Adam wasn’t being mean, [but] it got tense because Bobby kept nervously missing it by a hair, and then they go, ‘Stop.’ They stop again, they go, ‘Okay, on this one: just normal.’ You hear them yelling it, and we all start going, ‘Oh my God,’ because everyone’s so tired.”
Spade added that Sadie and Sunny Sandler were also present during the scene.
“Every time you said it, I’m like, ‘Is that the one?'” Spade recalled. “And it was like, ‘Nope!’ Because then [Sandler] comes out and is like, ‘Hey — what are you doing?'”
Lee, reflecting on the moment, said having just a single line made things more nerve-wracking.
“What happens when you’re doing one line is, the whole time when you’re watching the scene, all you’re doing is thinking about that one line, and you’re running it through your mind 10,000 times.”
