Adam Sandler with a Czech Accent in ‘Spaceman’ Would Have Been “Ridiculous,” Says Director

Were I in charge of casting Spaceman, the new sci-fi drama now streaming on Netflix, Adam Sandler’s name would not have been the first one to come to my mind. For one thing, the script—written by Colby Day, who adapted Jaroslav Kalfař’s 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia—is almost entirely devoid of humor. For another, the lead character in the movie is Czech. The Sandman may have proven he’s a skilled dramatic actor with movies like Uncut Gems and Hustle, but he’s not exactly known for his accent work—unless you count the silly, sometimes offensive voices he puts on for his ’90s comedies like The Waterboy and You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.

But aside from a few oddly delivered lines, Sandler does not attempt an accent to play the role of Jakub Procházka in Spaceman, a lonely astronaut on a year-long solo mission to the edge of the solar system. In fact, apart from his name and his knowledge of Czech legends, there’s absolutely no indication that his character is anything but American.

In an interview for the Spaceman press notes, Swedish director Johan Renck said he never once considered asking Sandler to do a Czech accent for the movie. “I never do accents in my films. I rely on letting the immersion and the characters be,” Renck said. “Yes, Jakub Procházka is Czech, but there’s the backstory that nobody knows that, in his younger years, to become an astronaut, he studied at some university in the U.S. If we would’ve started having everybody having some weird Czech accents, I can’t do that. It is just ridiculous. And even though Jaroslav, the author of the book, is originally Czech, he wrote the book in English. These stories are universal; the locality and the nationality are secondary.”

Fair enough! But one can’t help but wonder why Renck didn’t simply just make his lead character American in this movie adaptation of Spaceman. Every reminder that, actually, Jakub is Czech is a jolt, because it’s all too easy to forget. It never failed to pull me out of the story when I realized that I was supposed to be pretending that Adam Sandler is not an American national treasure, but is, in fact, Czech.

Also, not to get too in the weeds about the practicality of a movie featuring a giant talking spider, but the idea that the Czech Republic is going to be the first country to collect this special space dust—and not, say, the U.S. or China—is a little silly. I’m just saying!