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.”
In The Waterboy, she played Mama Boucher, the overprotective and devoutly Christian mother of Sandler’s Bobby Boucher, a socially awkward water boy.
It seems Bates has made a habit of not finishing scripts, as she also revealed to THR that she almost passed on Matlock because she didn’t read the entire screenplay for the legal drama.
“Matlock is a miracle for me,” the actress said. “I had one foot out the door. A film that I did not too long before just was such a heartbreaking disappointment. You know, at my age, I’m going to be 80 in two years, I just thought, this is not working out, it’s not giving me any happiness.”
She continued, “Then I got the script for Matlock. And at first I was reading, and I was talking to my friend in New York, Billy. I said, ‘Ah, this is just a procedural.’ He said, ‘Did you read it? Did you finish it?’ He said, ‘Read it to the end.’ So, I read and, of course, it’s got this great twist at the end. And I thought, ‘OK, now we’re talking.’ I wanted it to be about something. I didn’t want it just to be a case of the weak. And the fact that there’s this woman who’s got a real mission and something in the real world that people are struggling with.”
The series, which has been renewed for a third season, follows Bates’ Madeline Matlock as she rejoins the workforce at a prestigious law firm and uses her wily tactics to win cases and expose wrongdoing.
Bates added that she’s especially grateful for the show because “times are hard. A lot of people in this industry are out of work,” and so “a big part of our joy is that we have a place to go every day. We have something wonderful to make.”