Adam Sandler imagined the bizarre, wildly unglamorous life he says he would be living if Hollywood had never worked out.
On Saturday (Jan. 3), the 59-year-old actor turned his Chairman's Award acceptance speech at the Palm Springs International Film Awards into a long, hilarious imagining of the life he thinks he would have lived if his acting career hadn’t panned out.
"When I graduated college, I got a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and my father told me he was very proud of me and I should try it out for one year,” Sandler said near the 1:43 mark in the video linked above. “[He said], 'See if you get something cooking. If it doesn't work out after one year, you'll come work for me.’ My dad was an electrical contractor. I didn't know very much about electricity or contracting."
From there, Sandler painted a picture of himself wiring fuse boxes instead of acting, joking that he would still be married to his wife Jackie but living in a far humbler home with "about 10 less bathrooms and a few less statues of me."
He then listed the supposed benefits of this imagined life, saying he would "probably know how to charge my own phone."
“I would probably still get stopped on the street a lot for pictures, but not because of the fame factor as much as they've never seen anybody with that much scoliosis,” he added.
He dragged longtime friend Rob Schneider into the hypothetical, quipping that Schneider would work with him “on every electrical contracting project I ever had to do."
Sandler pushed the joke even further by contrasting glamorous trips with a much stranger alternative, saying, "I probably would have not just had a vacation in Hawaii. If I wanted to go swimming, I would have just gone 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 he joked about the possibility of not being with his wife in that version of events, he quipped, "But you're gonna miss the glow in the dark penis!"
The Happy Gilmore actor repeatedly looped back to how fortunate he feels that the one-year gamble paid off.
"I've been acting a very long time," he said. "I can't thank you all enough for letting me have this career that l've been lucky enough to have." He called Jay Kelly a recent creative peak and described the pressure he put on himself while working with Noah Baumbach and the cast.
"I didn't want to let him down. I didn't want to let down any of my castmates. I didn't want to let down my family. I didn't want to let myself down. So I always try my best,” he said.
Sandler closed the speech by thanking his wife, whom he called "my forever girl," and by promising to keep going, telling the crowd, "Thank you guys for letting me make all these movies over the years. I'm going to try to make more."