Sunny Sandler, the actress who went from a baby in Grown Ups to carrying a Netflix musical

Sunny Sandler

Depositphotos

Born	November 2, 2008 Los Angeles, California
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Hotel Transylvania, Hustle, Hotel Transylvania 2

On Jimmy Fallon’s couch this summer, sent out to sell a film in which she sings, grieves and carries almost every scene, Sunny Sandler ended up spending a good share of her airtime on her father’s socks. Adam Sandler, she explained, wears them into the swimming pool and only peels them off once he is floating, because bending down on dry land is too much trouble. Fallon refused to believe it. She held her ground and laughed. It was a small, silly exchange, and it described the deal at the center of her career with unusual precision: the Sandler name gets her into every room, and the Sandler name is what everyone in the room wants to talk about.

She has never pretended that deal does not exist. Nearly every credit she holds comes from Happy Madison, the company her father runs, and a good number of them cast her as the daughter of whatever character he happens to be playing. What has changed is the size of the parts. In little more than a year she played the would-be ballerina whose tuition drives the plot of a sequel watched by tens of millions, led a musical drama about a dying mother without her father anywhere on screen, and then went back to the franchise where she first appeared as a toddler, this time as one of the grown-up children its title now refers to.

A childhood spent in the margins of the frame

Sunny Madeline Sandler was born in Los Angeles on November 2, 2008, the younger daughter of Adam Sandler and the actress and model Jackie Sandler, born Jacqueline Titone, who had met him when he cast her in Big Daddy in 1999. Her sister Sadie, two years older, has followed the same path into acting. The family is Russian-Jewish on her father’s side and Italian-American on her mother’s, a mix that would matter later, when the most personal film of her early career turned on a bat mitzvah.

Her screen career began before she could have known it was one. In Grown Ups, released in the summer of 2010, she appears as the small daughter of Tardio, one of the friends in the orbit of her father’s character, Lenny Feder. From there the credits read like a catalogue of the walk-on: a girl at a rope bridge in Just Go with It, a little girl on a cruise ship in Jack and Jill, a lemonade-stand kid in That’s My Boy, one of the stepdaughters in Blended, a scout in Pixels. She returned as Tardio’s daughter in Grown Ups 2 and lent her voice to the animated Hotel Transylvania films, first as one of the additional voices, then as the infant Dennis, and finally, in Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, as a character named Sunny.

When Happy Madison moved its output to Netflix in the middle of the last decade, she moved with it. The Ridiculous 6, The Do-Over, Sandy Wexler, The Week Of, Murder Mystery, The Wrong Missy and Hubie Halloween all carry her name somewhere in the cast list, usually attached to a single scene. The pattern continued into her early teens with Home Team, Hustle and The Out-Laws. It is easy to file all of this under nepotism, and the label is not wrong. It was also an apprenticeship no drama school could have staged. By the time she was asked to carry a film, she had spent more than a decade watching professionals hit marks and repeat takes from a few feet away.

The bat mitzvah that became a film

In May 2022 she celebrated her own bat mitzvah at a Los Angeles country club, with Jennifer Aniston, Taylor Lautner, David Spade and Peyton List among the guests and Charlie Puth and Halsey performing. Barely a year later she was playing a thirteen-year-old planning one on screen. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, released by Netflix on August 25, 2023, was directed by Sammi Cohen from Alison Peck’s adaptation of Fiona Rosenbloom’s 2005 young-adult novel. Sandler played Stacy Friedman, whose plans for the perfect party collapse when she and her best friend Lydia, played by Samantha Lorraine, fall for the same boy.

The film was a family operation from top to bottom. Adam Sandler played Stacy’s father and produced, Sadie played her older sister Ronnie, Jackie Sandler played Lydia’s mother, and Idina Menzel played Stacy’s mother. None of that stopped the reviews from landing on the young lead. In its opening week the film overtook Hustle as the best-reviewed title of Adam Sandler’s career on Rotten Tomatoes, and the site’s critics consensus ended with a line that followed her into every interview afterwards: the film “suggests a bright future for star Sunny Sandler.” It still holds 91 percent across 80 reviews.

The roles that followed kept her close to home. In the animated Leo, released that November, she voiced Summer, a girl who talks without pause and forms an unlikely bond with the class pet, a lizard voiced by her father. She had a small part as Anna in Spaceman in 2024 and a cameo alongside her mother in Amy Schumer’s Kinda Pregnant early in 2025.

Vienna Gilmore and a year of sequels

Happy Gilmore 2, released on July 25, 2025, gave her the most visible part of her career to that point. She played Vienna, Happy’s youngest child and only daughter, a dancer whose teacher recommends a ballet school in Paris that costs $75,000 a year. That tuition is the reason her father picks up a golf club again, which makes Vienna the engine of the plot even when the film is busy with cameos and nostalgia. Her mother played Vienna’s dance teacher; her sister played an undercover FBI agent. The sequel drew 46.7 million views in its first three days and topped Netflix’s English-language film chart, although critics were cooler: it sits at 61 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus describes it as fan service.

The following spring the family spotlight moved to Sadie, who led the Netflix college comedy Roommates, directed by Chandler Levack and released on April 17, 2026. Sunny walked the carpet at its Los Angeles premiere four days earlier. The two films had been shot in parallel in New Jersey during the summer of 2025, and coverage of both read them as a single strategy: a producer stepping back from starring vehicles of his own to build projects around his daughters.

Don’t Say Good Luck: a lead without her father on screen

Don’t Say Good Luck, released worldwide on Netflix on August 14, 2026, is the first film to rest entirely on her. Directed by Julia Hart from a screenplay she wrote with Laura Hankin and Jordan Horowitz, based on Hankin’s story, it casts Sandler as Sophie Birenbaum, a quiet sixteen-year-old who lands the lead in her high school’s production of the musical Waitress in the same weeks her mother’s cancer comes back. Melanie Lynskey plays the mother, Max Greenfield the father, Jack Champion the classmate cast as her stage love interest, Stephanie Beatriz the drama teacher, and Bebe Neuwirth and Steve Buscemi her grandparents, with Jon Lovitz in a supporting role. Hart, a former high school English teacher who choreographed school musicals, told What’s on Netflix that “young people deserved a movie that was built to last”.

The reception was the warmest of her career. The film holds 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes across 43 reviews and 73 on Metacritic. What’s on Netflix called it a “dual-threat performance of singing & leading the film” and singled out her live rendition of “She Used to Be Mine”, the ballad at the heart of Waitress, performed once on the school stage and again in a backyard for an audience of one. The same reviewer gave the film’s most raw moments to Lynskey, and that is a fair reading of a story built around a mother’s choices as much as a daughter’s; a less generous review at Pajiba put the Sandler family’s casting habits front and center.

The distance that only exists on screen

Here is the complication her career still has to resolve. Don’t Say Good Luck is routinely described as the film she made away from her father, and on screen that is true: he does not appear in it. Off screen he is everywhere. Adam and Jackie Sandler are both credited as producers, Happy Madison is one of the three companies behind it, and it was shot in the same New Jersey summer as her sister’s film for the same streaming partner. Every lead she has played so far has come through the family company. None of that cancels the reviews, which are hers and which no producer could have bought. It does mean that the real test of her independence has not happened yet. That test is a director or a studio with no Sandler on the call sheet choosing her for a part, and as of late 2026 no such project has been announced.

Back to Grown Ups, and what comes next

On August 3, 2026, eleven days before the film’s release, she sat down on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to promote it, told the sock story, and confirmed that cameras on Grown Ups 3 were about to roll. Principal photography began the following day in Morristown, New Jersey, and moved through the Keansburg Boardwalk and soundstages in Kearny before wrapping on October 14. Kyle Newacheck directs from a script by Adam Sandler and Tim Herlihy for Netflix and Sony Pictures. The premise announced with the cast is the gang finally free for an “ultimate adventure” now that their kids are all grown up, and Sunny, Sadie and Jackie Sandler are back as the Tardios: the toddler of the first film returns at seventeen as Sunny Tardio.

She attended the premiere of Don’t Say Good Luck with her parents and her sister, a reminder that the family unit remains the frame in which the public meets her. She turns eighteen on November 2, 2026, with a franchise sequel already shot and no release date yet. The next part that matters is the one nobody in her family produces; whether it arrives soon is the question Don’t Say Good Luck has made worth asking.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Adam Sandler, Happy Gilmore 2, Grown Ups 3, Sunny Sandler, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, Don't Say Good Luck

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