“Spaceman” director says Adam Sandler suffered ‘significant pain’ playing astronaut in sci-fi movie

The "Uncut Gems" star befriends a Paul Dano-voiced spider-alien in the sci-fi film from Johan Renck.

Warning: This article contains spoilers about Spaceman.

Putting aside the time Adam Sandler pretended to let Bob Barker beat him up in Happy Gilmore, the Saturday Night Live veteran is not an actor you usually associate with physically suffering for his art. But director Johan Renck says Sandler had a tough, painful time portraying someone living in zero gravity for the science fiction movie Spaceman (streaming now on Netflix).

The filmmaker explains that his star, "was on wires, which means that he’s kind of fixed to the set, he can’t piss off when he wants to at all. He can’t move, he can’t do anything, and also under significant pain, because that’s what happens with this harness and these rigs — they start digging into your flesh, and after 24 days of shooting, that pain is real, I will tell you."

Based on Czech author Jaroslav Kalfař's 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia, the film stars Sandler as an astronaut named Jakub who, six months into a solo research mission, is visited by a giant spider-like alien, voiced by Paul Dano. What sounds like the set-up for a sci-fi action-thriller turns out to be a meditative drama as Jakub and the extraterrestrial first make friends and then chew over the troubled relationship between the astronaut and Carey Mulligan's Lenka, the pregnant wife he has left back on earth. In short: Aliens this is not.

"The question remains: Is it really a sci-fi?" says the Swedish Renck, whose directing credits include the TV shows Vikings, Breaking Bad, and all five episodes of HBO's Chernobyl. "From a pragmatic point of view, it is science fiction, but at the same time, it does not at all behave like you would expect a science fiction film to move. It’s a slightly different kind of movie."

The director discovered that Sandler was interested in the project when he had a general meeting with the actor in Los Angeles.

"We have these meetings in this profession where you have a conversation and see if you’d like to play along with each other," says Renck. "During that conversation, Adam said, 'I heard about this space thing you’re developing. What is that?' I gave him the broad strokes of the idea, and he says, 'Oh, I have to do this.'"

The director explains that Dano was his first choice to voice the alien, who Sandler's Czech astronaut christens "Hanuš," because "there’s just something about his cadence and this version of a shyness that he weirdly represents in a lot of the roles he's played. Also, the fact that he can be a little creepy, to be honest."

Renck filmed the many sequences set on the spaceship at a studio in Long Island, where Sandler was forced to effectively act on his own, with the CG alien and Dano's dialog added later. The director recalls that the star "was acting against a tennis ball with me or somebody else reading the lines to him. Also, for me, it was really important to subject the cameras to the same physicality as our actor, namely zero gravity. We put the cameras on cranes with 360 heads so the cameras could rotate and go up and down. That [meant] that Adam was very much alone, all deep into our spaceship set, with these 60-foot cranes coming in from various directions. It was weirdly a meta experience in terms of isolation and loneliness for him, I think."

After wrapping the Long Island part of the shoot, Renck relocated to the Czech Republic so that he could shoot Earth-set flashback sequences featuring Sandler and Mulligan. The director describes this portion of the shoot as, "almost weird. All of a sudden you can say to an actor, 'Hey, how about you try to walk from over here to over there and then you sit there.' Something felt wrong through the shoot — it was too easy, actually, compared to shooting up in space."

Renck is aware that his film might prove to be a bit of a head-scratcher for anyone expecting either a high-octane sci-fi epic or an Adam Sandler comedy — and the director is perfectly fine with that.

"I never think about how things are going to be received," he says. "How the f--- would I ever know, to be honest? I think that people who expect things to be following a certain vernacular in any shape or form are going to [find] it problematic. If you just let yourself float away in the film it’s going to be much easier to deal with than if you’re sitting questioning stuff throughout like, Why is Adam Sandler in space?"

The cast of Spaceman also includes Isabella Rossellini, Lena Olin, and Kunal Nayyar. The film is now streaming on Netflix. Watch an exclusive featurette below for more on the movie.

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