For listeners like the young Safdies tuning in—whether out of admiration, disdain, or a potent combination of both—it was often indelible. In recent years, Francesa’s become a fixture to another wave of New Yorkers thanks in part to late-night host The Kid Mero’s long-running parody impression on his podcast with Desus Nice, Bodega Boys. Others may follow the Twitter account @BackAftaThis, which tirelessly posts Francesa clips that reveal their internal contradictions or glaring wrongness.
Over the course of our interview, Francesa maintained his trademarks, discussing Sandler’s critically lauded work in the film as if he were a criminally underrated Cy Young candidate.
“You know what amazes me is reading the reviews,” Francesa said, “a lot of the real critics, the guys who consider themselves real artsy critics, start with how awful all Sandler [movies are]—they don’t like guys who are popular. They like artsy guys. It offends them when guys are like Sandler who are popular. You know what? He should never apologize for the people liking him.”
Francesa and Sandler had previously met during the actor’s Super Bowl Radio Row stop-ins over the years. There was a baseball game on during a break in Francesa’s day of filming on Uncut Gems, and their trailers were next to one another. “Sandler bangs on the wall,” Francesa recalled, “and he says, ‘Mike.’ So I ducked my head in the trailer. He goes, ‘Do you have satellite?’ I said, ‘No.’ He goes, ‘Well I have the game on, come on out.’ So I said, ‘Oh, thank God.’ So I go.”
“He’s a really serious fan,” Francesa said. “He knows his teams. You can talk to guys that’ll tell you they’re a fan and they don’t know anything about the team. He knows his stuff. I mean he’s a real fan. So we were talking about that but really I was just picking his brain about the business. He was explaining a lot of the business to me, ‘cause he has his entourage with him. Listen, I have a driver, but he has a driver, he’s got this guy, that guy, he’s got a whole group of guys, which makes sense. So he’s got all these guys and he was explaining to me how he does his regular movies, and how different this movie was.”
“And this movie,” Francesa added, “he wasn’t getting paid a lot…he just wanted to prove he could do this role, clearly. So it was a big deal for him. Big challenge. And he did an incredible job. I mean, this is no hype.”
He seemed to break character only once. Almost bashfully, Francesa asked if it was plausible to think Sandler had a shot at best actor. He said he’s planning to see Punch Drunk Love, one of Sandler’s previous forays into serious acting, soon.
Especially back in the Mad Dog days, Francesa has long had a penchant for taking turns off the sports highway to discuss, say, The Sopranos or an Oscar race. Russo recently panned The Irishman on his Sirius show, primarily for its length and well-trodden subject matter, and Francesa had a similar response to the movie: “Who the hell am I to in any way knock Scorsese? Okay? But there’s two things I’ll take umbrage with. One, it’s too long. Okay? I don’t need all that stuff. I understand he wanted to try to explain the myth of why there is such an urban legend around the disappearance of [Jimmy] Hoffa, but I thought you can do that two seconds after you killed him. I didn’t think it had to be another 35 minutes. Also, I would’ve used a young guy for [Robert] De Niro rather than the way they used De Niro as a younger character. I didn’t like the younger De Niro character.”