Alexys Nycole Sanchez, who played Becky, the daughter of Adam Sandler and Salma Hayek’s characters in “Grown Ups,” has returned to the role for Netflix’s “Grown Ups 3.” Sanchez, now 23, last appeared as Becky in “Grown Ups 2,” released in 2013. Production on the new movie wrapped in late October.
Netflix announced the returning cast on Aug. 6 and hasn’t set a release date. Chris Rock, who is back along with Sandler, Hayek, Kevin James and David Spade, told Jimmy Fallon in early October that the movie should be out “probably next summer.”
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Quick facts
- Born June 29, 2003, in Moses Lake, Washington
- Plays Becky Feder, the daughter of Lenny (Sandler) and Roxanne (Hayek)
- Movies: “Grown Ups” (2010), “Grown Ups 2” (2013) and “Grown Ups 3” (Netflix, expected 2027)
- Won the 2011 MTV Movie Award for best line from a movie (“I want to get chocolate wasted”)
- Instagram: @alexysanchez7 (private)
How a 5-year-old from Moses Lake got the part
Her mother, Kyleigh Sanchez, told the Columbia Basin Herald in August 2009 that Alexys started asking to do commercials when she was about 4. Alexys took acting and modeling classes in Seattle, then went to a talent convention in Los Angeles, where she got eight callbacks and signed with a management company.
Hundreds of girls, maybe thousands, auditioned for the role in person, her mother told the paper. Alexys couldn’t get to the auditions, so the family sent in a video instead.
The tape got her a callback in Los Angeles to read with the cast. In a June 2010 interview with Spokane TV station KXLY, Kyleigh Sanchez remembered Sandler, Spade, James and Rock sitting around the table, with Rock across from her daughter making jokes the whole time. She said she wanted him to stop distracting Alexys and let her do her part. Alexys was 5 and couldn’t read yet, so she delivered her lines from memory.
The offer came by phone to the family’s hotel room, and Alexys and her brother jumped all over the bed.
Filming ran from May to August 2009 around Boston. On set, the director and crew gave her a few lines at a time to memorize, and she repeated them once the cameras were rolling. Spade “played with me a lot,” she told KXLY. When the Herald interviewed her in August 2009, she said she planned to spend her movie money on a cellphone like her mom’s and a kitten.
Her sixth birthday fell in the middle of the shoot. The family took her to Chuck E. Cheese, where Hayek showed up. Hayek also hosted fairy parties at her house for her own daughter and the children in the cast.
The “chocolate wasted” line
Becky’s famous moment comes early in the first movie, at a restaurant. Spade’s character mentions that the old friends used to go there after getting wasted, and when one of the kids asks what that means, Sandler’s character says it’s when you have a hankering for ice cream. The kids start chanting that they want to get wasted, and Becky announces she wants to get chocolate wasted.
Fans voted it the best line from a movie at the 2011 MTV Movie Awards, and Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel handed the award to the 7-year-old on June 5, 2011. Two years later, she told Parade she hadn’t expected to win. “At that time, I didn’t really even know what that was,” she said. It took a while, she added, before she noticed everyone repeating the line.
How old was Alexys Nycole Sanchez in “Grown Ups”?
She was 5 when filming started in May 2009 and 6 when the movie opened on June 25, 2010, four days before her seventh birthday.
| Milestone | Date | Her age |
|---|---|---|
| “Grown Ups” filming | May to August 2009 | 5, then 6 |
| “Grown Ups” release | June 25, 2010 | 6 |
| MTV Movie Award | June 5, 2011 | 7 |
| “Grown Ups 2” filming | Summer 2012 | 8, then 9 |
| “Grown Ups 2” release | July 12, 2013 | 10 |
| “Grown Ups 3” wrap | Late October 2026 | 23 |
Why did she step away after “Grown Ups 2”?
By 2012 the family had moved to Southern California. At an MTV Movie Awards gifting suite in Beverly Hills that June, the 8-year-old told an entertainment reporter that she had moved to California and loved the heat. She shot “Grown Ups 2” that summer on Boston’s North Shore.
The Sanchezes moved back to Washington in January 2013, and “Grown Ups 2” opened that July. In her Parade interview that October, Alexys explained the move home. Her mother was having a baby, and the family had no relatives in California, so they went home to have family around her new little sister. From there, she said, auditions could only be done by sending in tapes, and she was hoping to get voice-over work.
“Grown Ups 2” was her last film until Netflix cast her this year. Her management company, Brilliant Talent Management, congratulated her publicly when the new cast was announced, and her IMDbPro profile lists her as a member of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union.
Back with the “Grown Ups” kids
Netflix’s cast list for “Grown Ups 3” includes Sanchez as Becky and Jake Goldberg as her older brother, Greg. The movie’s official logline says the gang is “finally free to go on the ultimate adventure” now that their kids are grown. In Moses Lake, Source ONE News reported her casting the day Netflix made it official.
In late October, Goldberg posted an Instagram video of the franchise’s children, now adults, together again, and People wrote about it on Oct. 29. Sanchez sat at the front, with Ada-Nicole Sanger, who played Donna, and Kaleo Elam, who played Ronnie, beside her. “I love these people with my whole heart,” Goldberg wrote, tagging Sanchez as Becky Feder. The caption ended with a mention of Cameron Boyce, who played Becky’s brother Keithie and died in July 2019 at 20. Goldberg called him “our angel in the sky.”
Spade, who hung out with her during the first shoot, joked in the comments, “Who are these people??” In a second comment, he said they were the ones he had just seen on set. China Anne McClain, who played Charlotte McKenzie in the first two movies, wrote, “whaaaat look at Alexys.”
