Kathy Bates is proving that even Oscar winners can make a spectacularly bad first impression – at least when it comes to movie scripts.
The Hollywood icon recently revealed that Adam Sandler’s beloved 1998 comedy The Waterboy almost ended up permanently buried in her trashcan before filming ever began.
“I didn’t know who Adam Sandler was and I got a script. It was a football script, and I was like, ‘Oh, let’s give me a football.’ Twelve pages I read and I thought, ‘Oh man, I can’t do this thing. This is ridiculous,’” Bates admitted during a candid interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
The actress did not just put the script aside – she literally threw it away.
Thankfully, her niece had other plans.
“So, I just tossed it in the waste basket, and my niece, who works with me, saw it and picked it out of the [trash],” Bates recalled.
“She said, ‘What is this?’ So I said, ‘It’s a script that some kid Adam Sandler [wrote],’ and she went, ‘Adam Sandler! You don’t know the Hanukkah song?’”
That unexpected intervention changed everything.
Bates decided to give the script another shot and soon found herself fully on board. “So I took another look at it, and I thought, well, I’ll do this for Linda. Turns out we had the most fun. He’s brilliant. He’s a genius,” she said.
The actress went on to play the unforgettable Mama Boucher, the fiercely protective mother of Sandler’s Booby Boucher, helping turn The Waterboy into one of the comedian’s most iconic films.
Ironically, Bates confessed she nearly repeated history years later with Matlock. Initially dismissing the script as “just a procedural,” she only changed her mind after being urged to finish reading it.
One lesson seems clear: if Kathy Bates stops reading halfway through, Hollywood might miss out on another hit.
