At the 41st Annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival last Friday (February 6), Adam Sandler was honored with the Maltin Modern Master Award. During the event, the comedian sat down for an interview with Leonard Maltin, where he shared his recollections on a number of things, including how Kathy Bates almost didn’t play his mother in 1998’s The Waterboy. Sandler began by saying, “I don’t know if I have the story 100% correct, but apparently she kind of read the first page [of the script] and…threw it in the garbage.” He continued, “The guy who works with Kathy picked it up and read it and said, ‘Kathy, I think you should read that script. It’s pretty funny.’”
Bates previously told her side of the story to Conan O’Brien in 2019, and Sandler was right in thinking that his version was a little bit off. “I was in my bed, and I read the first 12 pages, and I thought, ‘Aw, this is a piece of s–t,’” Bates said. “And I always keep a trash can right by my bed, for all those scripts, you know. And so I threw it away.” According to Bates, her niece took it out of the trash and explained to her who Sandler was. “Don’t you know ‘The Chanukah Song’ from Saturday Night Live?” the niece asked. “So she made me do the movie,” Bates revealed.
Sandler says that he and Bates have been “very close” ever since and that she’s been one of his biggest supporters behind the scenes. Every time he takes on a serious role, Bates calls him up with words of encouragement. She even showed up for one of Sandler’s recent stand-up shows, which worried him a bit because he really values her opinions on things. “There were people laughing and then I locked eyes with Kathy, and I started pissing,” the comedian joked.
For Bates’s part, accepting the role was not something she ended up regretting. “People will come up, and they’ll talk about Misery,” she told SB Nation in 2018. “But a lot of people will talk about Waterboy.” Bates went on to say, “I don’t sit home and watch movies I’ve done before. What it is, for me, is looking back on an experience and remembering it fondly, because there’s many experiences I’ve had that have been more difficult or unpleasant or didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to turn out. This was one of the happy experiences that I’ve had.”
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