Adam Sandler experienced a pause in his romantic life when he found himself in the shadow of George Clooney.

The 59-year-old star of “Happy Gilmore” shared how he first encountered Clooney, who was then a leading actor in “ER” and is now 64. Sandler felt the overwhelming impact of Clooney’s celebrity status during their early friendship.

The pair met on the set of “Saturday Night Live” back in 1995. Not long after their initial meeting, they attended an NBA game together.

“It was during the peak of ‘ER’ when I went to a Knicks game with George,” Sandler recalled in an interview with The New York Times. “I remember feeling more invisible than ever. I thought I was on the rise to stardom, but then I realized, ‘Oh, no one is paying attention to me at all.'”

Sandler added, “Every woman in the venue was fixated on him, and every guy was thinking, ‘I wish I were that guy.'”

Clooney portrayed Dr. Doug Ross in the NBC medical drama for five seasons from 1994 to 1999. The hit show followed the lives of staff at County General Hospital in Chicago.

The Oscar winner had a different perspective of the sports outing.

“That was really fun,” Clooney recounted to the outlet. “We’ve always kept in touch, but never found a project. Then Noah called.”

Now, Clooney and Sandler are starring in the 2025 coming-of-age film “Jay Kelly,” directed by Noah Baumbach.

The Hollywood icons also took a moment to reflect on their journey with fame.

“I’d seen it from the point of view of my aunt [singer Rosemary Clooney]. She was a big star in Hollywood in the ’50s, then pop music changed, and she was out of business,” Clooney recalled. “She didn’t handle it well and lost about 30 years on drugs and booze, being pretty angry at life.”

“So I got to see fame from the when-it-doesn’t-work-out side,” he mused. “It’s a great lesson because you understand how little it has to do with you and that there is no success at all without massive amounts of failure.”

Sandler still has a strong recollection of auditioning to no avail.

“It didn’t ever get in my way,” he explained. “Because I was young and I just was like, ‘All right, keep going. Go, go, go, until it happens.’”

In October, Sandler told People just how close he and Clooney are decades later.

“He loves his friends,” gushed the “Murder Mystery” star. “We are good friends now, George and I. I love him. I really enjoyed my time doing everything, exercising, running around, playing hoop, throwing the baseball, throwing rocks, talking, hearing his stories about being a kid. It’s a very similar kind of upbringing in the fact that our buddies were important to us.”

Meanwhile, Sandler isn’t the only friend Clooney has from his days of early fame.

In 2022, the “Ocean’s 11” actor shared that he is still close with his co-stars from the series that shot him to stardom.

“I guess it was the friendship I have with all of them and that I continue to have,” Clooney said about his “ER” cast members while on “The Drew Barrymore Show” at the time.

“I had [Anthony] Tony Edwards at the house in Italy three weeks ago — he and Mare came,” Clooney noted.

He added that he is “really close” with Julianna Margulies and Noah Wyle.

“They’re really good friends,” continued Clooney. “And so I feel that [show] was a job of a lifetime. And it changed my career.”

In 2019, “ER” executive producer, John Wells said that there still might be a possibility of him scrubbing in for a reboot.

“We made an awful lot of ‘ERs,’ 331 episodes,” he told Deadline. “That’s a lot of hours, so I can’t imagine that we would, but if somebody came in with a really interesting idea about how to do it, we might.”

Wyle, 54, who was on “ER” from 1994 to 2009, now stars in and executive produces the hit Max medical drama, “The Pitt.”

In August 2024, creator Michael Crichton’s widow Sherri sued Wyle, Wells, “The Pitt” creator R. Scott Gemmill and Warner Bros. Television.

The lawsuit alleged that “The Pitt” is a rebranded version of an unauthorized “ER” reboot.

“The Pitt is ER,” the suit claimed. 

“It’s not like ER, it’s not kind of ER, it’s not sort of ER. It is ER complete with the same executive producer, writer, star, production companies, studio and network as the planned ER reboot. No one has been fooled.” 

Wyle told Variety: “This taints the legacy, and it shouldn’t have.” 

“At one point, this could have been a partnership. And when it wasn’t a partnership, it didn’t need to turn acrimonious,” the Emmy winner explained. “But on the 30th anniversary of ‘ER,’ I’ve never felt less celebratory of that achievement than I do this year.”