It’s well understood at this point that there’s nothing really stopping Adam Sandler from being shockingly effective in films except Sandler himself; the man has joked about it in interviews and awards speeches, but there really is a pronounced difference between those drama roles he commits himself to—most memorably, in recent years, with a genuine heart-in-throat performance in 2019’s Uncut Gems—and those jobs where he just sort of walks around in a hockey jersey, cracking jokes. But we’ve never heard of anyone trying to actually force the “Good” Adam Sandler into the pair’s shared body—until now, as George Clooney apparently attempted to manifest Adam Sandler, Serious Actor, on the set of their new movie Jay Kelly.
This is per THR, reporting from the AFI Fest showcasing of the Noah Baumbach movie, where Clooney reported that he attempted to pull some Jekyll-and-Hyde-type shit on his co-star and long-time friend—with a little additional taste of Beetlejuice in the mix, we guess—by banning anyone from calling Sandler by his “Sandman” nickname on set. “You get treated the way you treat yourself,” Clooney explained of his experiment in radical de-Sandman-ology. “This was a different kind of role for Adam, and I wanted to make sure that he wasn’t making fun of his incredible talent. He likes to just deflect and I was like, ‘You know what, dude, you’re really good in this film and you’re a really good actor and let’s not just make jokes.’”
Before we get to Sandler’s response to this, we just want to note what an incredibly funny and bizarre power move this is: It’d be kind of like if everybody else insisted on treating Daniel Day Lewis like he was Abraham Lincoln on the set of Lincoln, without ever actually consulting the man himself. Sandler, at least, sees Clooney’s efforts in a moderately positive light. While noting that, “I still call myself the Sandman; he can’t stop me,” Sandler added that Clooney “Is very protective over me. He’s a really nice guy. We would do all these scenes together and we’d get deep together and he’d say, ‘I just want people to recognize that’ and I’d say, ‘I’m OK, I like just working hard,’ and he’d say, ‘No.’ He’s very nice, he’s trying to look out for me.”
Jay Kelly sees Clooney play an aging movie star looking back on his life, while Sandler plays his dedicated manager. The part was written for Sandler by Baumbach, who previously worked with non-Sandman Sandler in 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories.
