Adam Sandler recently painted a funny picture of the strange, totally unglamorous life he believes he’d be living if Hollywood never worked out for him.
On Saturday (Jan. 3), the 59-year-old actor used his Chairman’s Award acceptance speech at the Palm Springs International Film Awards to deliver a long, hilarious imaginary version of the life he thinks he would’ve ended up with if his acting career hadn’t taken off.
“When I graduated college, I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and my dad told me he was really proud and that I should give it a year,” Sandler said around the 1:43 mark in the video above. “[He said], ‘See if you can get something going. If it doesn’t work out after one year, you’ll come work for me.’ My dad was an electrical contractor. I didn’t really know much about electricity or contracting.”
From there, Sandler joked about an alternate reality where he ended up wiring fuse boxes instead of acting, saying he’d still be married to his wife Jackie, just living in a much more modest house with “about 10 fewer bathrooms and a few less statues of me.”
He then rattled off the so-called perks of that imagined life, noting he would “probably know how to charge my own phone.”
“I’d probably still get stopped on the street for pictures,” he added, “but not because I’m famous — more because people have never seen anyone with that much scoliosis.”
Sandler also pulled longtime friend Rob Schneider into the scenario, joking that Schneider would be right there with him “on every electrical contracting job I ever had to do.”
He took the bit even further by comparing glamorous vacations to a far stranger alternative. “I probably wouldn’t have just gone on vacation to Hawaii,” he said. “If I wanted to swim, I’d just jump in the pond up the street next to the nuclear power plant. But it’s not all bad news, because then my penis would glow in the dark.”
When joking about the possibility of not ending up with his wife in that version of life, he added, “But you’re gonna miss the glow-in-the-dark penis!”
Throughout the speech, Sandler kept circling back to how grateful he is that taking that one-year chance actually worked out.
“I’ve been acting for a very long time,” he said. “I can’t thank you all enough for letting me have this career I’ve been lucky enough to have.” He called Jay Kelly a recent creative high point and opened up about the pressure he felt working with Noah Baumbach and the rest of the cast.
“I didn’t want to let him down. I didn’t want to let my castmates down. I didn’t want to let my family down. I didn’t want to let myself down. So I always try my best,” he said.
Sandler wrapped up by thanking his wife — calling her “my forever girl” — and promised to keep going, telling the crowd, “Thank you for letting me make all these movies over the years. I’m going to try to make more.”
