‘I was talking to a tennis ball’: Adam Sandler recounts the strange and lonely filming of Netflix’s Spaceman

Accustomed to comedies like Love and Amnesia, Funny People or Mythos, Adam Sandler is still just as great in the dramatic register. And he proved it in films like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love or the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems.

After the success of the latter, Adam Sandler appears very often on the homepage of Netflix, as the actor has signed a contract of 250 million dollars, which connects him with the platform for several projects that they produce and in which he stars.

He has had several other hits on the streaming service, such as the drama The Top of the Basket and the comedy You Can Forget My Bat Mitzvah!. This time, we find Adam Sandler in the space drama, the space drama, available from March 1 on Netflix.

What is Spaceman?

Written by Colby Day, for whom this is his first feature screenplay, and directed by Johan Rank (Chernobyl, Panthers), Spaceman is an adaptation of a novel. Astronaut in Bohemia by Yaroslav Kalfar.

Adam Sandler stars as Jakub, an astronaut on a research mission to the edge of the solar system, completely cut off from the world for six months. He discovers that his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan), who he left behind, may not be waiting for him when he returns to Earth.

As he tries to clear up the situation with his wife, a mysterious ancestral creature lodged in the bowels of his ship comes to his aid. This kind of extraterrestrial spider that Jakub calls Hanush (Paul Dano) will work with him to find out what happened before it’s too late.

Intense shooting for Adam Sandler

Adam Sandler went through an intense shoot for Spaceman, as he revealed at the film’s press conference during its presentation at the Berlin International Film Festival, reports variety. He explained that the cables carried him through the air and gave him the illusion of weight, harming him:

“The cables were strong because my body isn’t the most flexible. The wires hurt, they dug into my skin. The stuntmen who put the cables in every day didn’t believe me when I told them it hurt.”

Adam Sandler explained that director Johan Renck showed him how to float better in the air by standing in place with cables to show him the movements he wanted. But that wasn’t his only challenge: the actor had to imagine an alien spider while filming his scenes on the ship.

Named Hanush, the creature is voiced by Paul Dano and added later in the film’s editing special effects. If they had previously trained together to describe the suffering of loneliness, Adam Sandler was very alone during the filming, Adam Sandler was alone:

“I was talking to the tennis ball or to Johan’s friend who had come to get dressed and was hanging around. It’s a film about loneliness and the tennis ball allowed me to be alone and in my own world.”

Spaceman movie is available on Netflix.