LOS ANGELES – If you had to guess who Hollywood’s highest-paid actor was, chances are, you would pick the star of one of the top-grossing action films of 2023, like Fast & Furious 10’s Vin Diesel or Tom Cruise of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.

Most would not immediately think of Adam Sandler, the funnyman behind goofball comedies such as The Wedding Singer (1998) and 50 First Dates (2004), who also has a nice-guy reputation in the industry, known as down-to-earth and a devoted family man.

But Forbes magazine’s newly released Highest-Paid Actors of 2023 list reveals the 57-year-old American actor is Tinseltown’s surprise top earner, receiving a US$73 million (S$97 million) payday in 2023 after his agents, managers and lawyers took their cut.

And he was No. 1 by a good margin. In second place, Australian actress Margot Robbie of Barbie (2023) fame was paid US$59 million, and American actor Cruise was third with US$45 million.

The main reason was Sandler’s lucrative partnership with streaming giant Netflix, which began with a US$250 million four-picture deal in 2014.

Since then, Sandler has headlined eight movies for the platform and produced several more, many of them hugely popular, with subscribers spending more than 500 million hours streaming his films in the first half of 2023.

They included Murder Mystery 2, a whodunnit co-starring Jennifer Aniston, and the coming-of-age comedy You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah, an unabashed nepo-baby affair starring Sandler’s daughters Sunny, 15, and Sadie, 17, as well as his wife of two decades, Jackie, 49.

“There’s no such thing as too much Sandler,” Netflix chief Ted Sarandos said when he extended their partnership in 2020 with a deal thought to be worth up to US$275 million.

And viewers seem to agree even when the critics do not, or when Sandler takes a more serious turn.

Despite poor reviews, his newest film Spaceman, which sees him play a depressed astronaut who turns to an alien creature for relationship advice, became the third most-watched English-language film on Netflix worldwide shortly after its March 1 premiere.

At the Los Angeles premiere of the science-fiction drama, the actor makes fun of himself, as he often does, when discussing the physical challenges of filming.

One issue was that the spider-like alien, voiced by Paul Dano, describes Sandler’s character as a “skinny human”.

“So I had to drop, like, 25 pounds (11kg), and I hated that,” reveals the star, who, unlike many buff, polished A-listers, embraces more of a dressed-down and dad-bod look, but whom men’s magazine GQ hails as an alternative style icon with his trademark oversized shirts and baggy shorts.

“Then I was in wires almost all day long and I didn’t love that,” says Sandler, who spent up to 12 hours a day on set suspended from wires to simulate zero gravity.

“They dig into your sides. You have some weird little thing around you and the wires attach to that. Then all of a sudden, they pull you up, you’re floating and people forget you’re up there.

“They’re talking about things and you’re, like, ‘We’ve to get going, everybody – I’ve been up here a long time.’”

“Everyone else probably is good with it – I just have a weird body,” Sandler says.

Unlike most comedy stars, Sandler has also won acclaim for more serious dramatic roles in movies such as Punch-Drunk Love (2002), a dark romantic comedy, and the crime thriller Uncut Gems (2019), which earned him some of the best reviews of his career.

With him at the Los Angeles premiere are his wife and two daughters, who often accompany him to such events and also when he travels for work, which he is always reluctant to leave them for.

“When we do movies, most of the time, everyone comes along. It can’t happen every time – the kids have a life – so it’s a decision to make if you’re going to go away and shoot. It hurts,” he says.

“But it’s always good to be together and good to get home.”

• Spaceman is available on Netflix.