Adam Sandler is one of Hollywood’s most successful actors. His movies are often huge hits, though they do not always resonate with professional critics. Sandler said in a new interview that he stopped reading reviews for his movies back in the ’90s after critics bashed one of his earliest successful films, Billy Madison.
Sandler wrote the movie with Tim Herlihy and he recalled to Variety how surprised he was to read so many negative reviews of the film.
“When Billy Madison came out, me and my friend who wrote it, we were just like, ‘Oh yeah, they’re going to write about this in New York!’ We grew up reading the papers, we were going to NYU. And then we read the first one and we were like, ‘Oh my god, what happened? They hate us,'” Sandler said. “And then we were like, ‘It must have been this paper,’ but then 90% of the papers are going, ‘This is garbage.'”
Sandler’s later films like Happy Gilmore and The Wedding Singer were not exactly beloved by critics, either, and Sandler recalled getting calls from people asking him if he’d seen the negative press. But by that point, Sandler had stopped paying attention to reviews for his films.
“I’d be like, ‘I didn’t read it, man…’ But everything has turned out excellent. And it’s OK, I get it. Critics aren’t going to connect with certain stuff and what they want to see. I understand that it’s not clicking with them,” he said.
Sandler has turned in celebrated performances, too, as critics generally enjoyed his leading parts in the movies Punch-Drunk Love and Uncut Gems. Sandler threatened to make a bad movie on purpose if he didn’t get an Oscar nomination for Uncut Gems; he did not, and made Hubie Halloween next.
Sandler’s newest movie is the basketball film Hustle for Netflix, which is streaming now.
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