Adam Sandler discusses his response to seeing unfavorable reviews of his movie Billy Madison. Sandler began performing in comedy clubs at the age of 17, and his 1987 role as Theo Huxtable’s pal on The Cosby Show was his first on-screen role. He was brought on as a writer for Saturday Night Live in 1990, and the following year he joined the cast permanently.
After appearing in a number of smaller movie roles, Sandler co-wrote and starred in Billy Madison, which tells the tale of a spoiled hotel heir who enrolls in additional classes in order to gain his father’s respect and the opportunity to inherit his business empire. Although the movie received negative reviews when it first came out, fans now generally consider it to be one of Sandler’s best.
Sandler has picked up an incredible amount of film credits over the years, albeit many of them have drawn extremely negative reviews. With Entertainment Weekly, Sandler discusses his time in the spotlight and his most recent basketball drama on Netflix, Hustle. During the talk, Sandler reflects on his feelings after reading the first Billy Madison reviews, the movie he and his longtime partner Tim Herlihy co-wrote. He also acknowledges that he would ultimately decide to stop reading them. Look at his remarks below:
When I was 17 and I got into this, I didn’t think about critics … I didn’t even realize that stuff was coming. I just thought you made movies, people go see it. When Billy Madison came out, me and my friend who wrote it, we were just like, ‘Oh yeah, they’re going to write about this in New York!’ We grew up reading the papers, we were going to NYU. And then we read the first one and we were like, ‘Oh my god, what happened? They hate us.’ And then we were like, ‘It must have been this paper,’ but then 90 percent of the papers are going ‘This is garbage.’