There was no better place to be on a rainy Saturday night in Los Angeles than the Fairfax High School gym, where the stands were filled to capacity for something very different from a typical basketball game. Instead, fans had come out to see actors Adam Sandler and Timothée Chalamet in conversation about their respective careers, from Saturday Night Live to Punch Drunk Love to Call Me by Your Name to their most recent projects: Chalamet’s turn in the forthcoming Marty Supreme and Sandler’s role in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. (Although, yes, the two also shot some hoops.)
“I used to play at this gym,” Sandler tells Tudum, prior to sitting down with Chalamet. “It’s a perfect gym, because it’s not too big. So when you run up and down — a real gymnasium knocks you out, man. It’s so long. This is just a three-quarter gym. I used to play here on Monday nights, maybe 20 years ago. The guys I played with were great guys. The school used to get slippery, man. There’d be a lot of falling down, but not today. I think they fixed that.”
Plenty of other things have happened over the last couple of decades for Sandler besides the floors being relaxed. Namely, he worked on building an enviable career that first took off in the 1990s, and continued going to new and exciting places — including through his work with writer-director Noah Baumbach, who Sandler first worked with on The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) in 2017, before partnering with him again on Jay Kelly, alongside George Clooney, Laura Dern, and Billy Crudup, among others.
“Noah told me he was writing something,” Sandler says, explaining how he came to be involved with the film. “He mentioned that I was going to be a manager in it. He mentioned that I was going to have a family in it, and a year later he sent it to me. I loved this warm and conflicted character. I loved the entire movie… Clooney’s character and Laura’s and what they were going to go through throughout the movie — the journey of it all.”
At the heart of the film are Clooney’s mega movie star, Jay Kelly, and Sandler’s Ron, Jay’s manager; both men are forced to confront the choices they’ve made related to their careers, their complicated relationships with their loved ones, and the legacies they’ll leave behind.
For Sandler — whose wife, Jackie, and daughters, Sadie and Sunny, accompanied him to Fairfax High — the balancing act of career and family is a familiar one.
“Just like anybody with a job, if you can find a way to squeeze [your family] close to you and see them as much as possible, you do it,” he says. “It’s the kind of business that you go away for a long time. If it’s possible to bring the family, I always try to do that… You don’t want to be apart. It’s your true love. All you think about is your family and your wife and your kids.”
“The job we have making movies, it’s very important to us,” Sandler says. “We started young, and you climb up a ladder and you’re lucky and fortunate to get to do what you’ve dreamed about doing. To do any job as well as you can, it requires a lot of focus, a lot of time, and sacrifice — and your family makes that sacrifice and you make the sacrifice. You’ve got to know that’s part of anything that you want to be good at.”
That ambition, that desire to make the kind of film, to leave the kind of legacy, that shows how locked in you are to doing what you love is something that Sandler and Chalamet talked about sharing. It can be seen in the commitment they have to the roles they take and how much they admire the work of their fellow actors and filmmakers who do the same, whether, as they discussed, it’s each other, actors like Clooney, or the late Chris Farley and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and directors like Josh Safdie and Baumbach.
It’s a type of commitment that Sandler doesn’t always just bring to the screen, but also to the basketball court (he even mentioned playing ball with Clooney way back when the latter hosted SNL in 1995).
“When it gets serious and somebody challenges you to one-on-one, your brain goes, ‘Oh, yeah, you think you can beat me, huh?’” Sandler says. “And then you try to play as hard as you can. When you get a movie, when you get a good scene, you say, yeah, I just got to do my best to stay focused, concentrate, do the best I can, and not go home that night and say, ‘Man, I should have done that.’”
“One-on-one gets like that,” Sandler continues. “If you get beat, if it was an important game to you, you go home at night and go, ‘How did I do that? How did I let that happen?’ You go home, and after you win, you say, ‘That’s right.’ You tried your best, you thought it through, and you learn from it. You learn from your loss. You learn from your win. Movies when you lose though, oh, that hurts. I think that hurts more than a one-on-one.”
Jay Kelly is now in select theaters and will be streaming on Netflix on Dec. 5.
