American actor Adam Sandler has put aside his usual role as a comedian to play an astronaut in the science fiction drama Spaceman, which premiered this Wednesday at the Berlinale, the Berlin film festival. His character, Jakub, has been alone on a space mission for months and realizes that for years he has neglected his wife Lenka – played by Carey Mulligan – because of his career and that his marriage is in danger. He is helped to understand this by an intruder who enters the ship: a spider-like alien with whom he befriends, and to whom actor Paul Dano lends a soft voice of comfort and wisdom.
The film was programmed within the Berlinale Special section, very versatile in terms of formats and content, and which does not award awards; and will premiere on Netflix next March 1. Spaceman, based on the 2017 novel The Bohemian Astronaut, by Czech writer Jaroslav Kalfar, “is a film that talks about loneliness, but above all about disconnection,” its director, Johan Renck, said at a press conference.
But Adam Sandler, sitting next to him, did not elaborate on the more philosophical aspects of the film, and took advantage of his skills as a laughter generator to avoid answering questions of that nature. “Oh, that’s very deep!” he joked, although at the end he made a reflection: “You wonder why it is so important to go so far in search of something when what you have nearby is much more beautiful and perfect.”
It was a challenge for Sandler, he said, to deal with the cables that held him up to look like an astronaut floating inside the ship. “The cables were hard and my body is not the most flexible; “The cables hurt me, they stuck in me,” he said. Every day he told the technicians who were lifting me that it hurt, and they didn’t believe me… ”As a team, little by little, the issue was resolved. The rest of the cast includes Kunal Nayyar, Lena Olin and Isabella Rossellini.
