Christopher McDonald has become synonymous with Shooter McGavin. The character, says the co-writer of Happy Gilmore and its new sequel, is someone who is “handsome and preppy and would grow increasingly deranged over Gilmore’s success.” Photo / Netflix
Adam Sandler’s unlikely golf champ is back — and so is McDonald’s Shooter McGavin, one of sports movies’ finest villains.
Christopher McDonald does not deliver threats in rhymes. He does not tell fans to go back to their shanties. He would never say he eats “pieces of s*** like you for breakfast.” (He’d prefer to have a green smoothie with protein powder, spinach and fruit.) He is not, in other words, Shooter McGavin.
But also, kind of, isn’t he?
Almost 30 years after he first played the role, McDonald picked out his beige Polo and got his 9-iron ready for his return as the rival to Adam Sandler’s failed hockey player turned links champion in Happy Gilmore 2, which is available to stream on Netflix now. The warmly remembered, thoroughly silly 1996 sports comedy helped lay the groundwork for Sandler’s stratospheric career – and made McDonald’s face synonymous with his character, the kind of guy who’ll let someone know he’s a jerk by asking for a Diet Pepsi. (In the words of McGavin: “Choke on that, bay-bay!”)
It almost didn’t happen. By the time he was 40, McDonald was already considered one of Hollywood’s most dependable heels – the strikingly handsome dude with the mug you wanted to repeatedly punch who was churning out scene-stealing performances in films like Thelma and Louise. But he turned down the part in Happy Gilmore not once but twice in 1995. It’s not that he didn’t believe in the script or Sandler, then a recent SNL alum. But after more than three months filming the science fiction thriller Unforgettable, McDonald was burned out and didn’t want to be an absentee dad to wife Lupe and their kids.
“It’s exceptionally difficult to do that and to leave your partner with that kind of responsibility,” McDonald, now 70, says in a video conversation in early July. “So, I just said no to Adam.”
Then, McDonald played a hell of a round of golf and immediately wondered if Sandler and the producers still needed him on the green.
“I was feeling my oats,” he says. He agreed to do the film when he and his family got housing near the set in Vancouver for the summer. “They paid me to play golf,” he says, “and I’m still pinching myself.”
For years, McDonald hoped the industry’s opinion of him would shift from supporting actor to leading-man material, saying in 2000, “I’ve been one away from something huge for the longest time.” But in a career in film and television that’s included more than 100 projects over nearly a half-century, McDonald has had something huge all along in McGavin, the finger-gun-blasting, sweater-draped, privileged doofus who has earned his place among the greatest sports villains in cinematic history.
“That was my one away, probably, because I can’t walk down the street without getting, ‘Shooter! Shooter! Shooter!’” McDonald says. Once, a guy recognised McDonald as Shooter as he was relieving himself at a urinal at a Buffalo Bills game. “Shooter is the gift that keeps on giving.”
Being a compelling jerk on screen – and McDonald has played more than a few of them – is an art. Just ask Sandler.
“Chris was the real deal – more than us comedians – and he took it serious. We were kind of like, ‘Here comes the real actor,’” Sandler says of McDonald’s original performance as McGavin. “He took every costume serious, every scene meant a lot to him, and he thought through everything.”
The news of the Happy Gilmore sequel follows McDonald’s standout role as casino CEO Marty Ghilain in the HBO Max comedy Hacks, which earned him an Emmy nomination in 2022. Together, the projects have brought about a period of appreciation for the performer, from peers and fans of a character actor whom everyone loves to hate.
“He understands how to elevate something that isn’t overdone, but it lets the audience know that it’s a comedy and he’s playing a despicable villain,” says John Slattery, who performed alongside McDonald in the Broadway revival of The Front Page in 2016. “He’s in on the joke - and he’s everything you want in an actor like that.”
Julie Bowen agrees, noting how McDonald could have played McGavin as a cartoon character who “could just be nothing but smarm and a big smear of gross”.
“But there’s something about the way Chris plays it that’s right behind the eyes. When he says, ‘I eat pieces of s*** like you for breakfast,’ he doesn’t just scowl. There’s a drop in his face and this look of, ‘Oh no, I didn’t mean that,’” says Bowen, who is reprising her role as Virginia Venit in the sequel.
It’s a few days after the July Fourth holiday, and McDonald is hiding out in his colourful man cave while some friends are watching Wimbledon in the other room. He remembers the days before Shooter McGavin well, even if some people don’t.
Raised as one of seven children in Romulus, New York, by his father, James, a high school principal, and his mother, Patricia, a real estate agent, McDonald was premed at Hobart College before deciding to give acting a try his senior year and continuing his drama studies in London. After some early unforgettable films, including as T-Bird member Goose McKenzie in Grease 2, McDonald unleashed his inner blowhard in Thelma and Louise as Darryl Dickinson, the patronising, chauvinistic husband who desperately struggled for any sense of control. While he maintains he never tried to be a career villain, audiences and studios saw him as the actor who could find humanity in the bad guy.
“You can never judge your character, and you can never say, ‘Well, this guy’s a major a-hole.’ You just say, ‘This is how he thinks, and we’re going to push that to the limit and see how far we can get,’” McDonald says. “I guess I get typecasted a bit because people love the way I play the jerks and the bad guys.”
When Tim Herlihy co-wrote the Happy Gilmore script with Sandler, he says, they didn’t have a specific inspiration in mind for McGavin, other than someone who was handsome and preppy and would grow increasingly deranged over Gilmore’s success. But by the time McDonald came on board, Herlihy emphasised, the actor’s ability to “make the straight lines funny” is what made McGavin such a great, pompous fool, in the lineage of Ted Knight’s Elihu Smails in Caddyshack.
“I don’t want to overstate this, but coming from SNL, me and Adam sometimes viewed actors as people to work around, almost like, don’t screw this up,” says Herlihy, who also co-wrote Happy Gilmore 2 with Sandler. “Chris was one of the first times we got more than what we imagined in our heads, and we imagined it pretty good.”
Bowen initially thought of McDonald as Hollywood in the best way: charming, funny, smooth. Their takes from the Not Happy Place – where Venit, Gilmore’s love interest in lingerie, and McGavin, both dressed in all black, aggressively make out in a nightmare daydream – turned McDonald from co-worker to friend, she says. Years later, Bowen remembers going down an escalator after one of her Emmy wins for Modern Family and seeing McDonald come up another escalator next to her. Without missing a beat, they knew what to do.
“Immediately, we leaned over the two escalators, and I’m with my husband at the time and I’m holding an Emmy, and I lean over, and we just go [disgusting make-out noise with her tongue]. And we never mentioned it again,” she says, through laughter. “I turned to my husband and I was like, ‘You’re cool with that, right?’ He was like, ‘Trust me, yeah, but you guys are weirdos.’”
There’s a scene in the new movie where McGavin and Gilmore come face to face in a graveyard, before a fistfight nearly 30 years in the making. At the cemetery, there are headstones honouring the characters from the first film who have died.
In a film full of nostalgia and cameos, mortality is front and centre for these characters. The topic comes up a couple of times, unprompted, in our chat. A few days earlier, McDonald’s longtime friend, actor Michael Madsen, died of cardiac arrest at the age of 67. He lists the names of other actor friends who’ve died too young in recent years, like Ray Liotta and Bill Paxton. “It’s just crazy,” he says, admitting he’s still overwhelmed by Madsen’s passing. “That’s what hits me at a certain age. We’re only here for a short time.”
The deaths of his friends and peers have, in some ways, served as another reminder of how being largely recognised as McGavin has been a blessing. The character’s popularity surged into the 21st century once the film hit Blockbuster and cable channels like Comedy Central, where a modest box-office success morphed into a rewatchable cult classic for ’90s kids. McDonald’s popularity as McGavin soared even higher in the social-media age, where he’s been frequently GIFified for memes. McDonald even set up a Cameo account where people can still pay to have him send a personalised message as McGavin.
“I’ve embraced this character,” he says. “It’s been a godsend in a lot of ways.”
It was McDonald’s last day of shooting, and McGavin had just thrown a cup of scalding-hot coffee in the face of Frank Manatee (played by Benny Safdie), the owner of rival golf league Maxi Golf. When they got the scene done in one take, the crew applauded McDonald for bringing McGavin back to life.
Then McDonald looked over and saw Sandler, holding the elusive gold jacket. The last time we saw McGavin with the gold jacket, he had stolen it from Gilmore and was running away from an angry golf mob. But now, finally, it was Shooter’s turn.
“He said, ‘Alright, Shooter. I know you’ve wanted this. This is for you,’” McDonald recalls.
Sandler had the gold jacket made up for McDonald, hoping they could find a way in the script to give McGavin what he’s always wanted. When that didn’t pan out, Sandler thought, Well, we made the coat, so we might as well give it to the man.
The crew howled as if McGavin had actually won the Tour Championship. McDonald welled up, overcome by the act of kindness. Wearing the gold jacket, McDonald channelled his inner McGavin and started strutting, saying, “That’s right, baby!”
“He stayed in character and acted like it was the greatest moment of his life,” Sandler remembers. “It was a well-deserved moment for Chris and Shooter.”
This is what it might have looked like if McGavin had won the gold jacket all those years ago. What’s better than that?
“There were tears welling up, not just because it’s a gold jacket, but the fact that they saved one for me,” McDonald says.
“You don’t forget that.”