Javier Bardem’s strange obsession with Adam Sandler: “Who is this man? He’s brilliant”
In a sign of things to come and an early showcase for a performer who’d quickly gain international renown as one of the best of their generation, Javier Bardem notched the first Academy Award nomination of his career for his very first English-language production.
By the time he played Reinaldo Arenas in Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls, he’d been working solidly across film and television in his native Spain for more than a decade. However, Adam Sandler evidently wasn’t quite as big a name in Europe as he was in the United States after he became an early source of Bardem’s fascination.
By the time the actor had made the jump to Stateside cinema, Sandler was already a major star who’d powered his signature brand of comedy to huge success among the ticket-buying public. To most people, the Happy Madison founder was the guy who headlined Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, The Waterboy, Little Nicky, and The Wedding Singer, but that’s not who he was to Bardem.
Embracing Sandler’s bespoke style of lowbrow slapstick and crude humour wasn’t on the agenda for the future Oscar winner when he took his first steps into America. Bardem instead focused on the types of films he’d end up making himself: intimate, independent dramas powered by top-tier performances.
That led him directly into the path of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, which was his first introduction to not only Sandler’s work but also that of the actor and comedian in general. They almost worked together, too, with Bardem in the running for a part opposite Sandler in another one of his more restrained and dramatic turns, writer and director Mike Binder’s Reign Over Me.
As the filmmaker recounted to Entertainment Weekly, he discovered that Punch-Drunk Love was the only thing Bardem had ever seen starring Sandler, which left him completely oblivious to his status as a box office goldmine and the industry’s marquee idiotic manchild.
“Bardem doesn’t know a lot about American cinema, and he says, ‘Who is this man, this actor? He’s brilliant,” Binder shared of Bardem’s lack of Sandler-specific knowledge. “And I say, ‘You don’t know who that is?’ And he says, ‘No. I’ve only seen him in this movie, but I love him’. And I go, ‘Wow, you really don’t know who Adam Sandler is? Dude!'”
Bardem was clueless about Sandler’s repeated collaborations with Rob Schneider, David Spade, Allen Covert, and the rest of his repertory, making Punch-Drunk Love his only reference point. “Think about him,” the star mused of the actor he only knew from a single – and widely acclaimed – dramedy. “He’s so wounded.”
It wouldn’t have taken long for Bardem to discover what Sandler was most famous for contributing to the moving image, and for somebody who’d become so enamoured by his transfixing work in Anderson’s offbeat romantic odyssey, stumbling upon something like Mr Deeds or Big Daddy would have knocked him for a loop.
