Schneider’s a good athlete but what about Jon Heder and Rob Schneider, his The Benchwarmers co-stars? “You know Jon is a pretty decent athlete, he is just lacking desire and ability and talent [laughing]. No, he is actually pretty good. He had a broken leg and he was hitting the ball well. Literally he broke his leg in this other picture, but he is okay now. …He is young enough to recover; he will be all right.
David is pretty decent and you know he is competitive. You know to make it in this business there’s got to be this competitive edge you have, and he does have it.”
A Different Sort of Character: Audiences have gotten used to seeing Rob Schneider play characters that are out there, but this one’s different. He’s basically a normal guy – a real change for Schneider. “Adam just wanted me to play myself,” explained Schneider. “He said, ‘Come on, no one has ever seen that.’ He would actually come on the set and say, ‘No, no, no, no. Come on, no, no, no, no. Just be yourself,’ because I have tendency to be want to be goofy. You know, I realized kind of early on that I am playing [Adam]. He never said that but I sort of realized, ‘Okay, I get it.’"
Handling the Premise with Some Sensitivity: The storyline of grown men going out and beating a bunch of kids at sports had to be handled carefully so that a line wouldn’t be crossed where it all just seemed inappropriate. Schneider said, “I never knew the line to be honest with you because Adam would come up to me and say, ‘Listen when you go over to the first and second base, take the second baseman and throw him to the ground.’ …I was like, ‘Okay,’ and so I went and I just crashed into him. I just grabbed him and threw him down. Adam said, ‘You’ve got to really throw him to the ground.’ I said, ‘All right,’ and I threw him to the ground. He said, ‘All right, we got it,’ and I felt terrible.
You know what? There is a fine line there and that is kind of the thing about it was, when I was concerned originally when they were doing the script I said, ‘You know it works if they are really kind of selfish, mean spirited kids and if they come around at the end,’ so that you know it kind of works. But you’re right though. There is that concern."
Rob Schneider on the Challenges of Finding Comedies That Work: “All I can do is trust my instincts. I felt like this was a funny idea and this guy is really nice. David Spade - something about him in this movie, he was more himself than in any movie. I’m more myself in this movie. Jon Heder, I don’t know who is he but he was not Napoleon Dynamite in this. He is just kind of like a simple, funny guy. So it was really kind of like everybody was relaxed. Like as soon as Spade put the wig on, he was really comfortable.”
The PG-13 Rating: Rob Schneider says that while shooting The Benchwarmers they weren’t aiming for an audience of just kids. “Adam Sandler has that kind of teenage boy angst [vibe] down. …Like of our favorite movies, you know, when we were kids was Caddyshack so this seems to me like a Caddyshackish movie. It’s got more jokes per minute than any of Adam’s other movies and he was really hands on in it. So yeah I don’t mind it [the PG-13 rating]. I do think some things shouldn’t be for 13-year-olds, so this is okay for them. To me the most important thing is not being mean spirited or to be anti-gay or to offend some children who are trying to figure out what their lives are about.”
