The psychological space drama tested the actor more than Rob Schneider ever could

Netflix's new Adam Sandler movie is unique in the Sandman canon: despite sending the comic actor into space for an encounter with an oversized alien spider, most of the potentially narrow laughs are traded for melancholic tears. Like Solaris, The Fountain and Ad Astra before it, director Johan Renck's Spaceman is a meditative intragalactic drama that revolves around a heartfelt performance from Sandler. It's not the first film with the kind of visual effects that require an actor's unbridled imagination, but shooting Spaceman was a test that took him outside his comfort zone.

"In Jack & Jill, my twin sister was a tennis ball," Sandler joked to Polygon earlier this month. "I've had moments [with visual effects], but not a whole movie, and not a movie where I was on wires, and not a movie where I had to cry. I've never cried in front of a tennis ball before. I mean, once at the Jewish Community Center when we lost the game. But that was when I was 7. A long time ago."

Adapted from Jaroslav Kalfař's 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia, Renck's film stars Sandler as Jakub, a Czech astronaut who begins eight months into his solo journey to Jupiter. If isolation wasn't enough, his wife back home has stopped talking to him. Fortunately, a talking spider (voiced by Paul Dano) has appeared aboard the ship.