At first glance it may have seemed like a surprising choice of venue for a high-profile awards event, but really it made all the sense in the world when Adam Sandler and Timothée Chalamet teamed for a crossover Q&A on a high school basketball court in Los Angeles Saturday night. Both are huge basketball fans and ardent players — Sandler infamous for his occasional red-carpet fashion involving baggy mesh shorts, Chalamet as visible as Spike Lee during the New York Knicks’ long playoff run last year. The friends have played a lot together, too, and both regularly ball at Fairfax High School court that hosted the conversation (apparently the school is very accommodating for Hollywood star-athletes looking for pickup games).
Competing studios Netflix and A24 collaborated on producing the event billed Sandler x Chalamet, with the former promoting his supporting turn as a talent agent opposite George Clooney’s movie star in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, and the latter touting his performance as the titular ping pong ace in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. And the distributors brought the energy, enlisting a DJ, hype man and team of cheerleaders to fire up the frenzied crowd before the main attractions trotted out.
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In a wide-ranging conversation that well-surpassed its planned hour-long runtime, played like a live version of Variety’s Actors on Actors series and ended with an actual basketball game, the actors cracked wise, compared notes, repeatedly gushed over one another and showed past clips from their respective careers. We certainly didn’t have Big Daddy being met with as much reverence as Call Me by Your Name on this year’s awards season bingo card, but that’s what made this one so compelling and entertaining.
Here are some the other highlights:
They met on the set of 2014’s Men, Women and Children (and Chalamet’s role was cut)
“I grew up on American media,” Chalamet joked when first asked by the moderator how the two first met. “No, we did a movie called Men, Women and Children, that I got cut from,” he noted of Jason Reitman’s 2014 ensemble drama about small town Texas families struggling with technology that starred Sandler, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Jennifer Garner. “It was the right call,” immediately cracked Sandler.
Chalamet was 17 when he made his film debut as Danny Vance, whom he described as “the world’s skinniest quarterback.”
The now-29-year-old star recalled how he was “bummed” at the film’s Toronto International Film Festival post-premiere party when Sandler was leaving the event. “And you gave me a nice little shoulder pat, and it meant a lot,” Chalamet told him.
“I do remember meeting you, we hung out, there were a bunch of you little youngsters,” Sandler said. “I thought you were fantastic, kid. … I remember when Jason Reitman was talking about you being in it, he said to me, ‘I got this kid playing the quarterback, he’s fucking incredible.’ He knew right out the gate how good you were.”
“Yeah, but then he cut me, man,” Chalamet bemoaned to laughs from the crowd.
Saturday Night Live is also incredibly stressful for the hosts
It’s well-established now how daunting it can be for Saturday Night Live players when it comes to the cutthroat competition for airtime and getting their skits green-lit.
Sandler, who rose to fame on the late-night sketch show from 1990-95, confirmed as much. “It’s always been the same … you’re having the best time of your life, and you’re also panicked out of your mind. You’re like, ‘This is a one-shot opportunity.’ You gotta do the best you can, you try to stay focused. … But that energy will always be there. You just gotta enjoy it.”
But as Chalamet explained, the show is also incredibly stressful to host, which he has done three times, in 2020, 2023, and 2025. “[Your head is] spinning,” he said. “Each time I’ve been a little bit more comfortable. But every time I do that, I’m like, ‘Man, why did I do that?’ Risk versus reward, not that you do it for those reasons, but I could really fall on my face. It’s a crazy vibe back there. It’s intense… It’s kind of a mind-f–k.”
Sandler, though, was there for Chalamet yet again on his most recent stint, as he promoted his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown and performed tracks from the film on SNL. “I remember the last time I saw you in the hallway between sketches,” Chalamet said. “You made me feel good, man, you gave me a pat on the back. You were like an apparition.”
Sandler shared the touching inspiration for Big Daddy’s Scuba Sam scene
Netflix’s Sandler retrospective surprisingly skipped his two most iconic ’90s comedies, Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore — especially given a sequel to Gilmore burned up the charts on the streamer this summer. But Big Daddy holds a special place in the hearts of Sandler fans, too — like Chalamet.
“Amazing movie,” he told Sandler.
After showing the scene in which Sandler’s Sonny Koufax encourages 5-year-old Julian (Dylan and Cole Sprouse) to bathe by posing as the living manifestation of his favorite action figure, Scuba Sam, Sandler revealed the scene’s touching origin.
“That scene in particular was from my real life,” he said. “I loved this doll called Diver Dan when I was a kid. And I lost Diver Dan. … And apparently I was very upset, Timmy. And my father had this scuba suit. So he dressed up as Diver Dan, we lived in an apartment in New York. And he knocked on the door and my mother goes, ‘Somebody’s here to see you.’ And it was my dad dressed up, he had the mask on. And he said, ‘Are you the boy who was taking care of my son?’ And I go, ‘Yeah.’ And he goes, ‘I just want to say thank you, he’s back with me now. But I wanted to just personally thank you, he really had a great time with you.” And I was like, ‘Yeah, no problem.’ I always loved that, and my family talked about that story for years, so when we were doing Big Daddy, I tried to make sure we put something in there for my pop.”
Chalamet thinks Sandler should’ve won an Oscar for Punch-Drunk Love
While it was unsurprisingly a clip from his tour-de-force in the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems that drew the biggest cheers from the crowd, it was Sandler’s first widely recognized dramatic role, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 entry Punch-Drunk Love, that made a heavy impression on Chalamet as an up-and-coming actor.
“I don’t think I’ve ever really gotten to pin you down and talk to you about this film,” Chalamet told Sandler, “But I will say, to actors of all ages, but particularly my generation, it is one of the most important performances — important is not even the right word — impactful, moving [performances]. … People who aren’t in the know don’t understand how impactful that performance was, how incredible and nuanced and deeply lived-in and heartbreaking it is. … So thank you, because really as a young actor and knowing you for your comedic work and seeing thrown against the context of your other work, I went, ‘Wow, this is an incredible fucking actor. I hope I can give a performance like this.’
“I know you probably don’t want to hear me say this and we’re supposed to keep it light, but I hope for Jay Kelly, they should’ve done it for Uncut Gems, and I know it’s not about awards blah blah blah, but you should have a golden man in your arms and you’re one of the best f–king actors [alive].”
There is one scene in Dune: Part Two that Chalamet is particularly proud of
Sandler was equally wowed by Chalamet’s work in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies. “That must’ve shocked the world, seeing you like that, just taking over and being a badass,” he said. “First of all, you were very fluent,” he added in regards to the sequence screened from Dune: Part Two in which Chalamet’s Paul Atreides delivers a rousing speech to the Fremen, declaring himself the prophet, in the fictional language of Chakobsa.
“That was a helluva thing to memorize,” shared Chalamet, who noted he just wrapped production Dune: Part Three a few days ago and admitted to tearing up watching the clip. “You’re memorizing something in a made-up language. So I’m always very proud of that. Denis had me memorize it in English, too, so there’s versions of that that are normal spoken word [English].
“But that sequence I’m so proud of. … I always circled that scene, like, ‘OK, this is my shot.’ I wanted to prove to Denis and myself that in a movie this size, doing a speech in a made-up language in front of 800 people, that I can own it. And I’m so proud of that. I remember even calling a good friend of mine that night we shot it and I’m like, ‘Man, that went f–king awesome.’”
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