Source: Entertainment Weekly

Bobby Lee had a single line in The Wrong Missy — and it was one of the hardest performances of his career.

The comedian and actor recalled playing a check-in desk employee in the 2020 Netflix comedy during a recent conversation with David Spade (who starred in the film alongside Lauren Lapkus) and Dana Carvey on their podcast Fly on the Wall.

Lee’s line of dialogue in the movie is just five words: “Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Morris.” But delivering those five words from a desk in a Hawaiian hotel proved unexpectedly challenging due to an awkward conflict with one of the film’s producers, Adam Sandler.

“I’m on set, feeling good. It’s outside. Hawaii!” Lee recalled. “Everyone on that set is a friend of mine. ‘Action.'”

The Mad TV alum then heard someone yell, “Stop!” from video village. “It’s Sandler. Who never comes [to set],” he said. “He comes down and he goes, ‘Hey — what are you doing?’ And I go, ‘Oh hey, Adam!’ He goes, ‘What are you doing?'”

Lee said Sandler didn’t think his performance felt organic enough. “He goes, ‘It’s more natural. Do it more natural,'” he remembered. “So I go, ‘Okay.’ ‘Action’ again. I do it again. ‘Stop!’ He comes back.”

Spade recalled chuckling through the discomfort with Lapkus. “Me and Lauren start laughing, because it’s so tense and weird,” the Tommy Boy actor said. “Adam wasn’t being mean, [but] it got tense because Bobby kept nervously missing it by a hair, and then they go, ‘Stop.’ They stop again, they go, ‘Okay, on this one: just normal.’ You hear them yelling it, and we all start going, ‘Oh my God,’ because everyone’s so tired.”

Spade also noted that Sandler’s daughters, Sadie and Sunny, were present in the scene. “Every time you said it, I’m like, ‘Is that the one?'” he recalled. “And it was like, ‘Nope!’ Because then [Sandler] comes out and is like, ‘Hey — what are you doing?'”

Lee said his minuscule amount of dialogue put more pressure on each word: “What happens when you’re doing one line is, the whole time when you’re watching the scene, all you’re doing is thinking about that one line, and you’re running it through your mind 10,000 times.”

However, Lee’s story ended on a high note, because after finishing the scene, he drowned his sorrows by eating wontons at a hotel bar — where he met Magnum PI showrunner Gene Hong.

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“Over the next three or four years, I did 15 episodes of that thing,” Lee explained. “He wrote me — I was number-one on the call sheet. [I had my own] storylines. He’s my best friend now, Gene.”

Lee continued, “I would’ve never met him if I hadn’t done The Wrong Missy with that nightmare that you put me through.”

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