Adam Sandler Tells His Aspiring-Actor Teen Daughters to Learn from This Costar (Exclusive)

Adam Sandler has some practical advice for his daughters, aspiring actors Sadie, 17, and Sunny, 15: Learn from Carey Mulligan’s performances.

“Our kids want to be actors. And we go, ‘Well, watch Carey,’” Sandler, 57, tells PEOPLE of Mulligan, his costar in the new Netflix sci-fi drama Spaceman. The 38-year-old’s performance in Maestro also earned her a Best Actress nomination at this year’s Oscars.

In Spaceman, Sandler plays Jakub, an astronaut on a solo mission in outer space. Back on Earth, Jakub’s pregnant wife Lenka (Mulligan) has grown dissatisfied with the dynamic of the relationship, and decides to leave her husband while he’s millions of miles away.

Sensing that Lenka is drifting away, Jakub begins confiding in an alien-spider Hanus (voiced by Paul Dano) that has made its way onto the spacecraft.

“I love Carey. Listen, it's stuff she does in a movie, there's no way I could do it. There's no way I could. I just watch her and I say, ‘Well, that is just the next level of acting,’” gushes Sandler.

“I was just trying to make sure I stayed out of the way for Carey. She's amazing. It's so real. It's so effortless,” he continues.

Sandler recalls being so moved during one scene in with Lenka tapes a message to Jakub, explaining that she’s leaving him.

“This one scene — I was not in it — but I was there that day and I watched Carey do this kind of saying goodbye scene to me. And my goodness, I couldn't believe how amazing it was to watch and how deep it went like that,” he adds.

Mulligan is a fan of Sandler’s work as well. “I am such an enormous fan,” the Promising Young Woman star recently said in an interview with Netflix. “In fact, before we shot, I watched all of his movies.”

But Sandler tells PEOPLE that’s not quite true. “She only watched like six,” he quips. “She started all of them. Turned a lot of them off.”

Her two favorites? The 1998 comedy The Waterboy and the 2023 animated Leo, which also features the voices of Sander’s daughters.

“She loves Leo. You wouldn't think she would love Leo because she's a grown lady, but she locked in with Leo,” says Sandler.

Mulligan says she’s also partial to the 2017 dramedy The Meyerowitz Stories, costarring Ben Stiller and Dustin Hoffman.

“I think you love it because you thought I was Stiller in it,” Sandler jokes.

“I thought you were Stiller. I love Stiller,” Mulligan responds.

“She loves Stiller and somehow that benefited me,” Sandler replies.

Sandler has previously opened up about giving his daughters career advice. “I tell them to make sure you feel good about what you do and how hard you worked, and you judge yourself,” he PEOPLE last year at the Leo premiere.

“Don't let too many people try to get in your head. If you feel like you gave it your all, that's all you can ask,” he continued.

In 2023, Sandler, Jackie and their girls also starred in Netflix comedy-drama You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah. Sadie and Sunny played their dad’s onscreen daughters Ronnie and Stacy. 

They have appeared in other Sandler movies including the  2010 comedy Grown Ups and the 2020 comedy Hubie Halloween. Sunny also has a small role in Spaceman.

Spaceman streams on Netflix Friday, March 1.