The Oscar-nominated role written specifically for Adam Sandler: “I didn’t like the dialogue”
The chances of Adam Sandler earning an Oscar nomination are higher than they’ve ever been, which isn’t as terrifying as it would have sounded a decade ago.
Had someone told you in the late 1990s that the Happy Madison head honcho was edging his way toward awards season respectability, their heart would have dropped as they lamented how the profession of acting could have fallen so far that the ‘Sandman’ was a contender.
Of course, Punch-Drunk Love and Reign Over Me hinted that there was a talented thespian underneath all of the screaming, man-child nonsense, and shitty comedies, but it’s only recently that Sandler has started paying real attention to his still-untapped dramatic talents, and it’s about fucking time, to be honest.
He turns 60 years old in September 2026, and it’ll be sad more than anything else to see him desperately trying to cling to his comedic glory days. He was a revelation in Uncut Gems, but didn’t make the cut at the major awards ceremonies, while Jay Kelly got him on the Golden Globes shortlist for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ before he fell short of that elusive Oscar nod.
The notion of an acclaimed auteur writing a role specifically for Sandler to play sounded ludicrous until Paul Thomas Anderson did it first, and a couple of years later, Michael Mann, of all people, did almost the exact same thing, signing on to direct a script that had been penned with him in the role of a cab driver opposite Russell Crowe’s hitman that would eventually become Collateral.
The actor and producer was forced to drop out due to scheduling conflicts with James L Brooks’ Spanglish, which didn’t turn out as well as he was expecting, opening the door for Jamie Foxx to step in and become one of the rare names to land two acting nominations in the same year, with his win for Ray making up for his Collateral loss.
“Nothing’s wrong with Adam Sandler,” Mann explained, per The Hollywood Reporter, although some might disagree. “It took place in New York, the Jamie Foxx character was a badly-written Jewish cab driver, with the kind of stereotypes that can only come from someone writing that kind of character who’s foreign, who’s not American, that doesn’t live in New York. It was like Woody Allen playing the guy.”
Continuing his frank assessment, the filmmaker confessed that he “didn’t like the screenplay, I didn’t like the dialogue, I didn’t like the writing.” However, he knew he had the seed of “one of the most beautifully constructed stories I’d ever run into,” and after he rewrote it himself with the two leads now played by Foxx and Tom Cruise, Collateral turned into a gem.
Would Sandler have made the Oscars shortlist if Mann had persevered with him as Max, the cabbie who inadvertently ends up experiencing the worst night of his life? Maybe, maybe not. He’s definitely got the chops, but the director struggled imagining him in the part to such an extent that he doesn’t have any regrets about shooting Collateral with Foxx in his stead.
