“I can’t say I got very close with him”: when Christopher Walken rejected Adam Sandler
By all accounts, working with Adam Sandler is one of the most enjoyable experiences in Hollywood, which explains why so many people end up being welcomed into the Happy Madison family and refusing to leave.
The actor, producer, and occasional dramatic powerhouse has assembled a number of regular collaborators, including Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Steve Buscemi, Chris Rock, Kevin James, Rob Schneider, Tim Meadows, Maya Rudolph, and David Spade to name just a scant few.
Unfortunately for Sandler, though, Christopher Walken wanted no part of it. The two worked together on the 2006 comedy Click, where the idiosyncratic Academy Award-winning icon played an angel of death named Morty. It wasn’t even his first dalliance with Happy Madison, either, after he played three different roles in the company’s dismal Spade vehicle, Joe Dirt.
One of the veteran’s many eccentricities is that when it comes to rehearsing lines, he simply opts to memorise them so they’re right on the tip of his tongue on set. Despite displaying plenty of comedic chops and regularly being hilarious in his own way, improvisation is something that isn’t in his wheelhouse.
“He memorises the script, and when you do comedy, sometimes you do a lot of rewrites,” Sandler said of his process during an appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show before explaining how that didn’t jive with Walken. “We would call him up and say, ‘We’ve got some rewrites for you’. And he’d be like, ‘I already memorised it.’ Yeah, I know. I’ve got some new stuff you might like. And he’s like, ‘But it’s memorised already.’ Well, we’ll rewrite my stuff.”
Whether or not that contributed towards Walken’s complete and utter disinterest in forging an off-screen bond with Sandler remains entirely up for debate, but the latter’s extension of a personal olive branch was wholeheartedly rejected in the most deadpan fashion imaginable.
“I can’t say I got very close with him,” Sandler conceded. “I tried to. I was like, ‘We should hang out’. He’s like, ‘No.'” Clearly, Walken wasn’t in the mood for mixing business with pleasure, flat-out disregarding the prospect of engaging in some extracurricular activities with his co-star without even hearing what could have been in store for their prospective adventures.
There aren’t many people in the business who have a bad word to say about Sandler whether they’ve worked with him or not, but that doesn’t obligate them to spend time with the star during their time away from set.
Walken had better or more important things to do when he wasn’t required to ham it up as Click‘s resident exposition machine, although it’s not as if he’d have been invited to partake in his opposite number’s favoured pastimes of basketball and golf, the latter of which he once referred to in typically enigmatic fashion as “a mysterious occupation”.
