Kathy Bates' Near Miss with *The Waterboy*: From Trash Bin to On-Screen Mother

In 1998, Kathy Bates received a script for Adam Sandler’s sports comedy *The Waterboy*. After reading twelve pages she found it “ridiculous” and tossed it into a waste basket. Her niece, who works with her, rescued the script, prompting Bates to reread it and accept the role of Mama Boucher, Bobby Boucher’s mother.

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*The Waterboy* was written and starred by Adam Sandler, who had risen to fame through his novelty “The Chanukah Song” on *Saturday Night Live* in 1994. At the time, Bates, a 77-year-old Emmy and Oscar winner, admitted she “didn’t know who Adam Sandler was” when the script arrived.

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Bates said her first impression of the script was “ridiculous” and that after a second reading she found the project “the most fun,” calling Sandler “brilliant” and “a genius.” Sandler recalled sending the script to Bates and hearing that she “threw it in the garbage” after reading only the first page, a story he recounted at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. A colleague later urged her to read the script again, describing it as “pretty funny.”

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• “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,'” — Kathy Bates, Actress

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• “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]. 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?” — Kathy Bates

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• “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.” — Kathy Bates

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• “I remember we sent Kathy Bates the script for The Waterboy to play my Mama. I don't know if I have the story 100% right, but apparently she kind of read the first page and went [shrugs] threw it in the garbage,” — Adam Sandler

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Bates’s eventual participation marked an early collaboration that helped cement Sandler’s transition from sketch comedy to feature-film star, while showing how a single script’s reconsideration can alter casting decisions and broaden an established actor’s repertoire.

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Bates now headlines the legal drama *Matlock*, renewed for a third season, where she plays Madeline Matlock. She has noted that “times are hard” in the industry and that the series provides a reliable platform for continued work.

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