Kathy Bates is admitting she initially threw the script for The Waterboy in the trash because she wasn’t familiar with Adam Sandler yet.
During a recent video interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the Emmy and Oscar winner recalled the moment she first received the script for the 1998 sports comedy.
“I didn’t know who Adam Sandler was and I got a script. It was a football script, and I was like, ‘Oh, let’s give me a football.’ Twelve pages I read and I thought, ‘Oh man, I can’t do this thing. This is ridiculous,'” she recounted. “So, I just tossed it in the waste basket, and my niece, who works with me, saw it and picked it out of the [trash]. She said, ‘What is this?’ So I said, ‘It’s a script that some kid Adam Sandler [wrote],’ and she went, ‘Adam Sandler! You don’t know the Hanukkah song?”
Her niece was referring to Sandler’s novelty song, titled “The Chanukah Song,” which he debuted during his time on Saturday Night Live in 1994.
“So I took another look at it, and I thought, well, I’ll do this for Linda. Turns out we had the most fun. He’s brilliant. He’s a genius,” Bates said before adding, “I dove in the deep end and just had a great time. Just screwed around. And I loved working with him. That’s when he first started really getting known and people really flocking to see him.”
