Covert plays Alex, a 35-year-old video game tester who is forced to move in with his elderly grandmother (Roberts) and her friends when he loses his apartment because his goofball roommate didn't pay the rent for six months.
In addition to his day job of testing video games, Alex pays for room and board at grandma's by helping her out around the house (including sandblasting the place). He's also secretly developing a game he hopes will turn the industry on its head and working on getting together with his new hot boss (Cardellini).
Allen Covert on the Challenge of Playing the Lead Role: Covert’s appeared in dozens of movies, but always in supporting or cameo roles. In “Grandma’s Boy,” Covert has to carry the film. “It’s a lot harder because you have the people around you. You do kind of have to be the centerpiece. You just have to keep that character through, and a lot of that is just knowing the script. It helps to have written it because that way I was like, ‘Okay, well this doesn’t make sense for him to do this here.’ It’s hard to talk about it just from an acting standpoint because throughout the writing, that was always in the process.
But something like 10 Second Tom in ‘50 First Dates,’ please, I love that. I’m like, ‘Woo-hoo, I get to work for one day and people will remember that? All right!’ Plus I would get to turn around and there would be Dan Aykroyd standing right there. But little parts like that I love because it’s very specific. Those are a lot easier sometimes because they’re such specific characters. It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m the fat guy with the blonde perm who wears 100 costumes and is a little more pathetic.’ It’s all different. It’s just figuring out who the character is, mostly.”
Allen Covert on the Reality of a 35-Year-Old as a Video Game Tester: “That’s about the cutoff. I’m actually 40 and that’s Sandler’s favorite joke in the movie he says. He says he laughs harder ever time that I go, ‘I’m 35.’ He goes, ‘Ha-ha, yeah right.’ But no, I’ve since then met some that were a little bit older. But around then, that’s when people start kind of going, ‘Okay, you’re weird.’”
Allen Covert Compares His Sense of Humor to Adam Sandler’s: “Oh god, we’re pretty [similar]. You talk to his wife and my girlfriend, they will tell you that there is no difference in a lot of the things we do. I don't know. Part of the reason we’re friends, all of us that work at Happy Madison, is because we all met in college and when we all met, we all kind had the same sense of humor. The main thing that put me and Sandler together in the first place was we were in a class called History of Comedy. That’s where we met. People were doing performance projects and we kind of realized really quickly that what we thought was funny wasn’t what everyone else in the class thought was funny. So we just kind of stuck together because of that. I think it all boils down to ‘Caddyshack.’ We loved ‘Caddyshack.’”
Allen Covert on Developing His Own Style of Comedy Separate from Sandler’s: “We have similar styles of humor. Similar things make us laugh, but when we were doing standup, his standup was so different than mine. Even though I could help him write with a joke of his, and he could help me with a joke of mine, it’s different styles.
It’s kind of weird when I talk about the standup but his standup is very out there and mine was more story-based with a lot of crazy things mixed in it. But his could just be completely surreal. He had jokes about a six inch Elvis living in his refrigerator behind the ketchup bottle. I had jokes about doing mushrooms and talking to two pet parrots that my parents had. So they’re both very extreme, but mine was a little more reality-based and he could just find things funny anywhere.”
Allen Covert and Appearing in Adam Sandler's Movies: He’s a fixture in Sandler films but was missing from “Billy Madison.” So what happened? “That was the first one. I was actually going to be in that and apparently someone from the studio didn’t think I was funny. But that’s all right. If you look, there’s the scene where they throw pickles against the window. If you look through that window, there’s me. …I was up there for just a visit and they were like, ‘Go be the guy behind the counter.’ So I’m not really in the scene, I’m behind the scene but my face is in it.”
