There's an old adage in Hollywood about not working with dogs or children. It turns out that Adam Sandler learned this lesson early in his Hollywood career, thanks to an incident on the set of Billy Madison. Apparently, while filming the scene where Billy takes down an entire grade school class with a dodgeball he hit one of the kids a little hard, leading the child to start crying. This led to all of the parents on the set vocally taking an issue with Sandler, who responded.
I was like, 'No, no, no. That's the scene. I'm like a big guy, going back to school. I'm supposed to plug all these kids. It's part of the joke.' And they were like 'No, no, no.' I said, 'What are you talking about? Didn't they read the script?' They go, 'They're six. They don't read yet.'... I told the guys to roll anyway and I nailed a bunch of kids.
The story came out during a recent appearance on Conan by the comedian and actor. Somehow, the image of Adam Sandler knocking down children with dodgeballs is even funnier knowing there were a bunch of angry parents offscreen.
In all honestly, I think we may need to side with Adam Sandler on this one. The kids may not have been great at reading, but they likely could read. If they couldn't, then it was on their parents to prepare them for the scene. You'd never expect an adult actor to walk on to the set and have literally no idea what they were going to be doing. While getting hurt was certainly not what was intended, when the scene requires you to get hit in the face with a dodgeball, you just need to be ready for it. Check out the full story from Sandler, below.
Billy Madison was one of Adam Sandler's first big solo comedies and the more we hear about the set of that film, the more we think the entire production was just nuts. In addition to angry parents, we also had Norm MacDonald, who apparently filmed at least one scene completely wasted. Neither of these stories are particularly surprising, but we're sure there are even more great stories about Billy Madison to be told.
Adam Sandler is still making comedies, though his newest films are only viewable on Netflix. His next project, Sandy Wexler will hit the streaming service April 14.
