Adam Sandler: the comedian who got serious and now stars in a science fiction film

The vilified New York comedian has achieved praise from critics in recent years

Adam Sandler established himself as one of the greatest comedians in the world of acting. The American has a long history of comedy films, including They Are Like Children (2010), A Lying Wife (2011), As if it were the first time , A Great Dad , Click or Low Blow: The Final Game . Now, fans who are used to seeing the funniest side of the Hollywood actor will immerse themselves in his most dramatic role, with a new production that will land on Netflix soon.

This is Spaceman (The Astronaut, in its Spanish title), from Swedish director Johan Renck, who is also behind the acclaimed HBO Max series Chernobyl . The production was based on the novel that the Czech writer Jaroslav Kalfary published in 2017, The Bohemian Astronaut .

In the film, Adam Sandler will play Jakub Procházka, an astronaut who remains for six months in the middle of a mission in space to investigate the solar system. Loneliness will lead the protagonist to reflect on his relationship with his partner Lenka. On the verge of despair, he will come across a strange creature by the name of Hanus, with whom he will share his darkest thoughts inside his ship.

The production will arrive on Netflix on March 1, 2024 and fans of the actor will be able to enjoy an interpretation completely different from what they are used to seeing from Adam Sandler, in addition to the film that was released in 2019 and is also available on the streaming giant, Uncut Gems. He also provided his voice acting in the newly arrived animated family hit Leo (2023).

On this occasion, the American actor will immerse himself in the drama. “I wanted to have an interpretation that had nothing to do with what we know of Adam Sandler,” Renck noted in an interview.

Almost always criticized.

A man who tries not to lose his youth alongside his friends, a lover who wins back his partner day after day or a dad who has to learn to educate a boy in just a few days. The facets that Adam Sandler showed the public through the screen were varied, within the comedy genre. The long list of films with crude humor lacking, a priori, any subtlety and complexity, has earned him the hatred of critics who, in turn, have seen the actor chain one commercial success after another (he has a record record at the Razzies: nine). He himself has said that one of the reasons that fostered his taste for comedy was his father, a rather temperamental man who tended to get angry, which made him develop his sense of humor to calm situations. tense

Where is the key? Roberto Alcover Oti, who in 2015 coordinated the book Adam Sandler. Infinite Childhood assures that the characters he has played in his celebrated dramatic forays, such as Punch-Drunk Love (2002) or Make Me Laugh (2009), can be “deciphered as dark, sad, realistic versions of their usual figures.”

In the first of them, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, Sandler plays another character with a developmental problem in childhood and in a perpetual state of nervousness, who lives a love story while trying to make his way through a hostile world by shouting and hits. Anderson, also the author of titles such as Magnolia and Licorice Pizza , has always defended that what he wanted to make was, essentially, “an arthouse Adam Sandler film.”

In the aforementioned book, according to El País de España, Alcover Oti gives clues about Sandler’s success before the public: because he is not a winner who achieves success without breaking a sweat, but rather “a loser” who makes “his defects into virtues.” succeed, since we do not always succeed.”

In his acceptance speech for the Independent Spirit Award, in 2020, for Diamonds in the Rough , the actor born on September 9, 1966 in New York, in addition to thanking critics for the effort to “pretend” not to hate him “for five minutes” , sarcastically claimed independent cinema as “an important part” of his filmography. “From my intrepid look at the American educational system through the eyes of a privileged sociopath named Billy Madison (1995) to my scathing exploration of college football and its manipulation of socially challenged athletes like Bobby Boucher ( 1999’s The Waterboy ) )”, said.

Sandler has noted about the criticism he has received: “When Billy Madison came out and the newspapers started writing about it, we were excited. We had written the film and now a New York media outlet was going to talk about it. But when you read what they said, 90% of the newspapers announced that it was ‘garbage.’” The actor acknowledged that those words marked him for a time, and since then he decided not to read anything else. “It’s very hard,” he said. After decades in the business, the comedian now admits he understands why his films don’t resonate with critics: “They’re not going to connect with certain things, and that’s okay.”

(With information from La Nación and El País of Spain).