If you’re an absolute golf nerd and, while watching “Happy Gilmore 2,” noticed Adam Sandler’s swing had a bit of a familiar smooth finish to it, your eyes did not deceive you.
Just after the premiere of the long-awaited sequel to one of golf’s best movies, which garnered the largest opening weekend for Netflix ever, PGA Tour winner Hunter Mahan revealed that he played Sandler’s swing double for the role of the titular character.
On this week’s episode of GOLF’s Subpar, Mahan told co-hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz that the role came about just last September.
Mahan said he was getting ready to coach a high school tournament when his agent got an inquiry for his acting services.
“Someone from Happy Madison… and didn’t explain it fully, just was like, hey, they need someone to swing for Adam, for Happy Gilmore,” Mahan said. “And he’s not real happy with the people that have their swinging, and he’s very particular about it.”
Luckily, Mahan was able to get coverage for the end of the tournament so he drove up with the team on Sunday, coached on Monday, flew out on Tuesday and was in full custom by Wednesday.
As it turns out, Sandler loved how Mahan did the Happy Gilmore swing, and by Friday, Mahan had signed up to work on the set for the next six weeks.
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“Just be there for basically whatever he needed,” Mahan said. “And whatever I could do, whether it’s just like standing, a swing, B-roll, another camera somewhere, and to shoot close-ups of things, just whatever. I was sort of at their beck and call for the next six weeks.”
But it wasn’t just plug and play for Mahan. He spent lots of time making sure his performance was true to the original film. He even got some instruction from Sandler himself.
“I was looking up ‘Happy Gilmore,’ the first movie, and figuring out, how does he get into his, is it a walk, is it a shuffle, which foot goes first, you know? I wanted to be as professional and real as I could,” Mahan said. “And so, I kind of messed around with a few different things and tried to get, I mean, his finish is very high, right?
“It’s like, you can kind of tell, it’s like, boom! And it’s kind of, he kind of falls over with his foot, and there’s not really, he’s not really standing there. It’s a big high finish and stuff, so I wanted to make sure I got that as good as I could.
“And I think it was the first day of Thursday, I was kind of introduced to him kind of quickly, and he’s like, I want it to be big, and kind of walking into it wasn’t as important, but kind of like a big, long, exaggerated swing, as big as you could, and tall, you know, kind of be really tall through is what he sort of instructed me to do, and how he wanted it to look. And so I kind of focused on that as best I could.”
