Adam Sandler knew early on in Brendan Fraser’s career that he was a rock star.
The two actors interviewed each other in a video released Tuesday for Variety’s Actors on Actors series. At the start of their conversation, Fraser was stunned by a story Sandler told him about their 1994 film Airheads, which both starred as members of a metal band who take a radio station hostage to play their demo tape.
At the time, Fraser was best known for his role as a caveman named Link in the silly 1992 film Encino Man. Sandler was mostly known only as a performer on “Saturday Night Live,” but he used his small influence to get Fraser the lead on “Airheads.”
“[The director] Michael Lehmann was very much against you,” Sandler told a shocked Fraser. “He said, ‘I don’t understand. I don’t see the caveman in this film.’ And I just said, ‘He can do other shit, man.'”
“I finally went to his house at 4 a.m., woke him up … I said … ‘You have to know Adam Sandler isn’t going to be in ‘Airheads’ unless old Fraser is in it.’ So he changed his little tune,” Sandler said.
“He flew out to Chicago to meet me!” Fraser said, still incredulous, noting that Lehmann “sang a different tune” when they first met for the role.
Sandler also revealed that the director wasn’t the only obstacle in Fraser’s eventual casting. The Hustle star said Pauly Shore, who co-starred with Fraser in Encino Man, asked Sandler not to push Fraser for a rather opportunistic reason.
“He kept saying, ‘Just in case we do Encino 2, I don’t want him to do shit to anyone else,'” Sandler recalled. “And I said, ‘Don’t do that to him.'”
“That’s Pauly,” Fraser admitted.
Luckily, there never was an Encino Man 2. But Fraser appeared as Link the Caveman in Shore’s 1994 film In the Army Now, referencing a line he had in Encino Man.
During the conversation between Sandler and Fraser, they also talked about Shore’s lobbying for a role on Airheads that he didn’t get. To find out what it was, watch the video above.