Spaceman gave Adam Sandler a new skill: ‘I’ve never cried over a tennis ball’

After that of Paul Thomas Anderson Stupid-drunk loveto that of Noah Baumbach The Meyerowitz Stories (new and selected)to Jason Reitman’s Men, women and children and the Safdie brothers Uncut gemstonesMovie fans should be used to the idea of ​​Adam Sandler as a comedian willing to play dramatic roles. But they still haven’t seen him give a performance like he did in Netflix’s new sci-fi movie Spaceman. His character, the Czech astronaut Jakub Procházka, is painfully introverted, emotionally repressed and, above all: Calm. Sandler’s dramatic roles were very much about energy – sometimes restless, barely controlled, often aggressive energy. Jakub is so muted and compressed that he seems like a trauma victim.

He also spends more than half the film talking to a giant alien spider, voiced by Paul Dano.

“I felt a little self-conscious,” Sandler told Polygon via Zoom, in an interview he shared with Dano. “At first I wasn’t sure what to convey! And then I just sat down and tried to feel what I was feeling, and just live it as much as possible (…) by just giving the most calm performance possible.

Sandler says the role felt like a challenge to him, especially because of that muted energy. ‘My instincts are not very quiet. In real life I’m quite nervous; I’ll get going quickly. Things get me excited pretty quickly. So (director Johan Renck) definitely tried to control me here and bring something different to the performance.

The film, an adaptation of the 2017 novel Astronaut from Bohemia written by Czech author Jaroslav Kalfař, is a solemn drama in the mold of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solarisor to some extent Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. The story revolves around Jakub’s disintegrating state of mind after eight months alone in space, as he investigates a glowing cosmic phenomenon that has become visible from Earth. Meanwhile, his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan), heavily pregnant and at home due to her own breakdown, decides to leave Jakub, and his handlers (including Isabella Rossellini) try to prevent him from finding out. And then the giant spider appears, and Jakub is afraid he’s going crazy.

Amid all this emotional drama, Sandler dangled the film from a wire rig to simulate gravity and have intimate emotional conversations with a tennis ball on a stick – the standard movie set replacement for a CG character that will be added later. Dano recorded his lines separately, in a studio environment. They were later added to the film, along with its alien character, eventually called Hanuš.

It wasn’t Sandler’s first role in which he had to treat a stand-in object as a living character. “In Jac & Jill (where Sandler played both title roles, thanks to digital compositing), my twin sister was a tennis ball,” he said. “I’ve had moments. But not a full movie, and not a movie that had me on the phone, and not a movie that made me cry. I’ve never cried in front of a tennis ball. I mean, one time at the Jewish Community Center when we lost the game. But that was when I was seven. Long ago.”

Even when delivered with self-effacing, solemn seriousness, that reflexive joke still feels like the kind of Borscht Belt comedy Sandler uses so often, even in his serious roles. In Sandler films like Uncut gemstones or Judd Apatow’s Funny people, humor and drama mingle and complicate each other. But Spaceman was an exception to that rule, according to Sandler.

“Johan was quite adamant from above about the fact that he had no comedic instincts on this film,” he says. “I just said, Let me just be this guy, to take what I read in the script and go from there. And Johan pushed me there. I never called him and said: You know, I definitely thought of a joke that could work here. I just said it like that Let’s make me feel what Johan wants me to feel.”

Although he and Dano rarely interacted during production, Dano says Renck brought them together ahead of time to get a sense of how their characters would interact, to develop the tone he wanted for the film.

Image: Larry Horricks/Netflix

“We did some Zoom rehearsals, which was actually a really good way to break the ice and slowly warm up to it,” Dano told Polygon. “We just read through the script. It’s its own thing, this movie, so you have to kind of figure out where you’re walking together so that when you imagine it, you’re making the same movie. I passed by the set a few times. But Adam – I don’t think it can be understated that he was hung up by wires, talking to a tennis ball or a stand-in. It takes a very big commitment of the imagination to make yourself go where he went.

For his part, Sandler says Dano’s interpretation of Hanuš, the alien, was something he stuck with throughout production, even when they were working separately. “Paul, as a person, the way he played it, just his voice, had an impact on me,” he says. “And whoever read the lines with me when Paul wasn’t there tried to radiate that calmness and that spiritual wisdom.”

Dano says they both relied on Renck to “guide the different pieces,” to ensure their separate performances felt consistent and connected. “There are a lot of cases of loss of trust when you’re making a film,” he says. ‘Or put on a play. Or do something like that, actually. So you have to rely on the fall.”

Spaceman opens in limited theatrical release on February 23. The film will stream on Netflix from March 1. Polygon will share more about the film closer to its Netflix release, including an interview with Johan Renck, explaining why he wants Sandler to play him in the inevitable film. biopic.