Julie Bowen’s Competition for Her Part in ‘Happy Gilmore’ Tried a Full Sharon Stone Reveal
Julie Bowen didn’t have a lot of credits on her IMDb when she auditioned for Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore. An episode of Party of Five here, an appearance on Acapulco H.E.A.T. there. So it’s no wonder why she was nervous auditioning to be Happy’s love interest in the golf comedy.
Bowen confessed to James Corden earlier this week that she wasn’t good at pulling off “sexy” — she didn’t wear high heels to her audition (like she did on Corden) and, in fact, remembers showing up in overalls. “Signing in, there were all these girls who were so beautiful and well-coiffed in short skirts and they knew what they were doing,” she says. “And I was terrified sitting there going ‘I’m never going to get this job.’”
Finally, Bowen walked into the room with Sandler and Happy’s producer and director, passing a beautiful woman who “swans out.” For some reason, all of the production crew was “looking sort of ashen and shellshocked.” Bowen started her reading her lines, and from the looks on their faces, she thought, “Oh God, they hate me. They just hate me! Something horrible is happening and I don’t know what it is.”
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But to Bowen’s surprise, she got the job. And eventually, Sandler and friends told her what had happened. That actress who had sashayed out in front of Bowen? She’d given the crew “the full Sharon Stone experience.”
“They were absolutely shaken to their core,” Bowen says, someone what surprised that they didn’t care for the peep show seeing as they were dudes and all.
“No, no, no,” the men said. “We were so happy to see your frickin’ overalls.”
Even after getting the gig, Bowen was fairly certain Happy Gilmore wouldn’t make a dent at the box office. On the film’s 25th anniversary, she admitted to Yahoo! Entertainment that she “just thought, ‘Oh, no one will ever see this.’” Happily for everyone involved, “I couldn't have been more wrong.”
