Adam Sandler Was Hugely Relieved When His Daughters Didn’t Suck at Acting

However you feel about the nepo baby discourse now that it’s a more public discussion, we all knew there was zero chance Adam Sandler’s kids weren’t going to end up in his movies. The man is a bastion of loyalty, which he’s proven again and again with cast lists you could set a clock to, even as some members get a little, um, oblique with their political views. Given that he’s still sticking Rob Schneider in stuff, there’s no chance he’s not gonna give a role to a blood relation.

So his daughters Sadie and Sunny have, as expected, been quickly inducted into the Sandler actor armory. According to Sandler, that came with a huge amount of relief when he saw that they could actually act worth a rat’s ass. They’ve appeared in Hubie Halloween and You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, and they’ve got their own roles in the upcoming Happy Gilmore 2.

Asked about watching his daughters act by E! News, Sandler gave a refreshingly honest reaction: “Oh, my god, you’re just relieved. Once they do it well, nothing feels better as a parent. It must be like when you’re the parents of a baseball player and you’re at the game and they get a hit. You just go, ‘Thank God.’ It’s just so much relief.”

Which to me, is infinitely more palatable than some swill about how every actor’s child is borderline prophesied for screen and stage. “Oh, when she was three, she did these incredible emotive looks, and the first book she grabbed off the shelf when she was tall enough was the collected works of Shakespeare. Her first word was ‘mama’ and her second and third were ‘Greta Gerwig.’”

Acting isn’t a genetic trait, outside of maybe high-level control of eyebrow musculature, so there’s a chance that a famous actor’s children will be bad at it. Worst of all, that doesn’t mean they’ll stop doing it. So I can totally understand Sandler’s relief that he’s not going to have to pound tables in production meetings for the rest of their life so they can stone-face their way through small roles while he cuts around them spiking the camera.