Adam Sandler — whose 48th birthday we celebrated last week with his greatest SNL moments — has decided this year to give more serious fare a stab again, after admitting that most of his family movies are basically paid vacations. He’ll star in The Cobbler (directed by the fantastic Thomas McCarthy, who helmed The Station Agent, and acted on The Wire) and, later, as a guy with a porn addiction in Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children.
In the meantime, because he’s Mr. Serious Actor in 2014, he’s actually doing a few print interviews, rather than simply showing up on Fallon in his sweatpants to sing duets with Drew Barrymore.
In the interview with The Daily Beast, after confessing that he took cobbling lessons for the role (“All I wanted to do was please Daniel Day-Lewis. That was the goal — make sure Danny D. is happy.”), talk turned to Saturday Night Live, and his firing along with his best friend Chris Farley in 1995.
“Yes, we were [fired],” says Sandler. “We kind of quit at the same time as being fired. It was the end of the run for us. The fact that me and him got fired? Who knows. We were on it for a few years, had our run, and everything happens for a reason. We kind of understood because we did our thing. It hurt a lot at the time because we were young and didn’t know where we were going, but it all worked out.”
Well, it all worked out for Sandler, anyway. I wonder if Farley would’ve take the same route as Sandler into family fare and maybe, softer slightly more dramatic roles like the ones that John Candy used to do? He’d have been great, and I bet at this age, he’d be wizened and soft-spoken, and he’d show up on episodes of Louie. We’ll never know, and that’s a damn shame.
Sandler agrees.
“I miss Farley,” he says. “He was a tour de force on the show and dominated. He could dominate anybody. There’s nobody that can walk into a room and take over better than Farley. I haven’t seen anyone since he’s gone that’s taken that spot. He’s the strongest presence I’ve ever seen.”
He ain’t kidding.
We all miss you, Farley.
Source: The Daily Beast via Vanity Fair
