Kathy Bates admitted she threw the script for The Waterboy in the bin because she wasn’t yet familiar with Adam Sandler.
During a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the Oscar-winning actor recalled the moment she first received the script for the 1998 sports comedy.
“I didn’t know who Adam Sandler was, and I got a script. It was a football script, and I was like, ‘Oh, let’s give me a football.’ Twelve pages I read and I thought, ‘Oh man, I can’t do this thing. This is ridiculous,’” she said.
“So, I just tossed it in the waste basket, and my niece, who works with me, saw it and picked it out of the [bin]. She said, ‘What is this?’ So I said, ‘It’s a script that some kid Adam Sandler [wrote],’ and she went, ‘Adam Sandler! You don’t know the Hanukkah song?”
Her niece was referring to the novelty track, titled ‘The Chanukah Song’, which Sandler debuted during his time on Saturday Night Live in the early ’90s. “So I took another look at it, and I thought, well, I’ll do this for Linda,” Bates continued. “Turns out we had the most fun. He’s brilliant. He’s a genius.
“I dove in the deep end and just had a great time. Just screwed around. And I loved working with him. That’s when he first started really getting known and people really flocking to see him.”
In the film, she played Mama Boucher, the overprotective Christian mother to Sandler’s Bobby Boucher, a shy, socially awkward water boy.
Back in 2022, Sandler appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, and explained how Bates helped him handle negative reviews when they starred together in the 1998 film.
“I remember Kathy Bates in Waterboy, and I loved her and I loved everything she did,” Sandler said. “I remember telling her when somebody brought up critics that I was like, ‘They’re probably not gonna like it. They’re probably gonna say bad stuff, maybe don’t read it.’ And she said, ‘Well, I like it, so that’s all that matters,’ or something like that. She was cool.”
His films have fared better more recently, and in 2023, You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah landed a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes ahead of its release.
Earlier this year, he made a characteristically light-hearted speech at the AARP’s Movies for Grownups Awards, where he vowed to make at least 50 more films before retiring, quipping: “At least 25 of them will be good.”
At the time, he nodded to the other attendees in the room, including Bates and his Jay Kelly co-star George Clooney.
NME sat down with Clooney and Sandler earlier this year, with each actor sharing the one album they always return to.
Speaking about his love of Hole’s 1994 release ‘Live Through This’, Sandler said: “I remember I was on tour. I was doing standup and uh that album just came out and I was in my car a lot and I listened to the track one and I was like, ‘Ooh, that was Nasty’. Track two, I was like, ‘two for two.’ And then I just said, ‘I guess this whole album is going to be great.’”