Spaceman gave Adam Sandler a new skill: ‘I never cried in front of a tennis ball before’
After Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, after Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected), after Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children and the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, film fans must be used to the idea of Adam Sandler as a comedian willing to step into dramatic roles. But they still haven’t seen him give a performance like the one he delivers in Netflix’s new science fiction movie Spaceman. His character, Czech astronaut Jakub Procházka, is painfully introverted, emotionally repressed, and above all, quiet. Sandler’s dramatic roles have mostly been about energy — sometimes restless, barely contained, often aggressive energy. Jakub is so muted and compressed, he seems like a trauma victim.
Also, he spends more than half the movie talking to a giant alien spider voiced by Paul Dano.
“I felt a little self-conscious,” Sandler told Polygon via Zoom, in an interview he shared with Dano. “In the beginning, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to convey! And I then I just sat and tried to feel whatever I was feeling, and just live it as much as possible […] just having as quiet a performance as I could.”
Sandler says the role felt like a stretch for him specifically because of that muted energy. “My instinct’s not very quiet. In real life, I’m pretty jumpy — I get going quick. Things get me heated quite quick. So [director Johan Renck] was definitely trying to control me on this one, and bring something different to the performance.”
The film, adapted from the 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia written by Czech author Jaroslav Kalfař, is a solemn drama in the mold of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, or to some degree, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. The story revolves around Jakub’s disintegrating frame of mind after eight months alone in space as he investigates a glowing cosmic phenomenon that’s become visible from Earth. Meanwhile, his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan), heavily pregnant and going through her own breakdown back home, decides to leave Jakub, and
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