Under Sandler's wing, he's taken off
Nick Swardson had only been doing comedy for six months when he got the chance to be on a showcase for young talent at the US Comedy Arts Festival in 1996. And with managers and agencies courting him, even calling his mother and telling her to ignore calls from competing agencies, Swardson wanted only one thing -- Adam Sandler's autograph.
Swardson remembers his first conversation after settling on a manager. "I remember my manager going, so what do you want to do, sitcoms, movies?" he says. "What do you want to get out of this? I was like, I heard Adam Sandler was here. Can I get his autograph?"
Now Swardson has been working for Sandler for the past four years. According to Swardson, Sandler saw his Comedy Central special while channel surfing in bed with his wife, and tracked him down for a meeting the next day. Swardson wound up rewriting a script for what had been a PG romantic comedy at the time called "Grandma's Boy." He gave them the hard R-rated script they were looking for, and he's been writing for Sandler ever since.
"They just gave me the movie and said, write yourself in it, do whatever you want," he says. "And they were really open to all my ideas. They've all been great to me. Adam's just been a great influence and a great friend."
Much of 30-year-old Swardson's career has been that way. An easygoing kid from Minnesota, Swardson has seen his career blossom almost by accident. He had always wanted to write and create his own projects like childhood idol Woody Allen, but hadn't done anything to further that when he met Jamie Kennedy, then host of his own reality prank show, "The Jamie Kennedy Experiment," on which Swardson also worked.
Kennedy pushed him into writing his first script, for "Malibu's Most Wanted," despite his protests that he had never done it before. "We bought a screenwriting book," says Swardson. "I would stay at his house and he would talk me out of going out drinking and he would pay me cash out of his own pocket. I wrote a draft in two weeks."
Swardson is hardly a household name, but he is selling out 1,200-seat theaters and has a career that would be the envy of most comics. He'll release his first album this fall, and he's working on a Sandler-produced pilot for "Gay Robot," an animated show also tentatively scheduled to debut in the fall. Sandler is producing his first big-screen vehicle, an as-yet-untitled movie Swardson will write and star in, due sometime in 2008. Swardson also wrote and produced on this summer's Sandler/Kevin James vehicle "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry." And he occasionally gets recognized for his cameos in "Blades of Glory" and "Reno 911."
Though he's still accessible onstage, it can be tough for Swardson to find relatable material when he's steeped in Hollywood success. "I can't be like, 'You know, Paris Hilton's reeeeally fun,' " he says. "What's he talking about? 'You know when you lose your diamond hat? What a bummer.' "
Where does he go from here? Swardson has never been able to guess what would come next in his career, so predicting where he'll be in five or 10 years seems impossible to him. "I can see myself as kind of a Betty White," he deadpans. "I have no idea. I've fallen into everything. I could be the next Superman, for all I know."
