Adam Sandler couldn’t stand one ‘Saturday Night Live’ star: “It affected my ego greatly”
He might be one of modern Hollywood’s most polarising stars, mainly because his comedy movies are almost uniformly terrible, but one thing most people would agree on about Adam Sandler is that he seems to be a standup guy.
If an actor or filmmaker makes friends with the Happy Madison head honcho, they’re basically set for life. They say it’s best to keep your friends close and enemies closer, but because the ‘Sandman’ doesn’t have any enemies, he’s drawn his friends in closer than almost anyone in the industry.
Whenever Sandler mounts a new production, it’s guaranteed to feature at least a handful of names from his revolving door of frequent collaborators. All of them have nothing but kind words to say about him, and the same sentiment applies to almost everyone who’s worked with him on anything.
Apart from Janeane Garofalo. She joined the Saturday Night Live cast at the beginning of its 20th season, which began airing in September 1994. Six months later, she was gone, and the comedian admitted that she was ready to leave well before then. Garofalo realised she’d made a huge mistake after discovering that sexist and misogynistic humour was the order of the day, with Sandler among the chief culprits.
There was already a target on her back after she’d described the previous season of SNL as “unwatchable” and called the majority of Sandler’s characters and sketches “childish.” Needless to say, it didn’t make for a happy atmosphere. Per New York Magazine, he wouldn’t even speak to her for the first several weeks of her tenure, and when he did, it was only to “berate her” for her contributions.
Garofalo had made some powerful enemies among the SNL ensemble, most notably Sandler and his closest cohorts, Chris Farley and David Spade. Her brief association with the long-running sketch show did significant damage to her confidence, and it sounded like she couldn’t wait to be released from her contract before it happened.
“It’s affected my ego greatly,” she said. “It’s affected me in ways I never anticipated. A lot of it for the good, and a lot of it had made me gun-shy. Definitely gun-shy. It’s always like you’re kind of wondering, ‘OK, who’s mad at me today?’ I think the show is better, and I’m not just saying that because I’m here. I truly do. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t cried a lot since I’ve been here.”
Of course, that was 30 years ago, and Sandler has mellowed since then. They got off on the wrong foot when Garofalo blasted his signature schtick, which was always going to cause friction in the workplace. They also had completely different styles, and she was trying to fight against the ‘boys club’ mentality that had dominated the show, which didn’t have the desired effect.
She did make a brief cameo in Sandler’s tedious 2017 movie, Sandy Wexler, though, so maybe the water has passed under the bridge. If he’s still making juvenile comedies when he’s closing in on 60, then it shouldn’t be a surprise he was a little immature and impetuous when still in his 20s.
