Adam Sandler's advice to daughters: learn from this co-star

Adam Sandler gave his daughters, Sadie and Sunny, acting advice, revealed in a new exclusive interview with People. "Our kids want to be actors. And we go, 'Well, watch Carey,'" Adam says. Carey Mulligan is Adam’s co-star in the Netflix film Spaceman (2024). "I love Carey. Listen, it's stuff she does in a movie, there's no way I could do it. There's no way I could. I just watch her, and I say, 'Well, that is just the next level of acting.'"

In the film, Adam stars as Jakub Procházka, an orphaned boy whose dream is to become an astronaut, but when he grows up and actually becomes one, he leaves his wife (Mulligan) back on Earth to discover that her love is not strong enough to make it through this trip.

During filming, Adam watched Carey perform a scene where she is ending their relationship through a video message and was completely moved. “This one scene — I was not in it — but I was there that day and I watched Carey do this kind of saying goodbye scene to me. And my goodness, I couldn't believe how amazing it was to watch and how deep it went like that,” he mentions.

Carey claims to be a fan of Adam’s, telling Netflix, "I am such an enormous fan. In fact, before we shot, I watched all of his movies."

Adam doesn’t quite believe that, joking, "She only watched like six. She started all of them. Turned a lot of them off." However, he admitted she loved his 2023 Netflix animated movie Leo, in which Adam voiced the main character, while his daughters provided the voices for the characters Summer and Jayda.

Sunny and Sadie have had small roles in many of Adam’s movies, including Grown Ups (2010), Just Go With It (2011) and Hubie Halloween (2020). Most recently, Sunny starred in You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (2023), with Adam playing her father and Sadie playing her sister.

Spaceman debuts March 1, 2024 on Netflix. ~Mackenzie Heidrick