On a recent weekday afternoon, Mike Francesa, the booming New York sports talk radio host, was sitting in a small conference room at the headquarters of indie film company A24. There was no microphone in sight, nor were there any callers with ill-informed opinions about the Yankees’ recent mega deal for Gerrit Cole or Adam Gase’s chances at remaining the Jets’ head coach beyond week 17. Still, Francesa easily slipped into vintage, steamrolling, aggrandizing form on even low-grade stimuli—like the subject he’d ostensibly come to discuss, his cameo alongside Adam Sandler in the new film Uncut Gems.

“We met for lunch,” Francesa said, explaining how the brother directing pair Josh and Benny Safdie had reached out to him, “and I hear from them the same thing, they’re guys in their 30s so I hear the same thing. ‘Oh, I grew up listening to you in my father’s car,’ which I get. I mean, that’s the standard line I hear everywhere I go…Dog and I both hear that our whole life.” (Dog as in his longtime WFAN show Mike and the Mad Dog’s co-host, Chris Russo.)

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The Safdies were after Francesa’s voice. “Listen, we have an idea,” he remembered them saying. “We have a character in the movie and what we want from you is the same tone that you use on the radio…I have this voice in my head and I want you to reproduce it.”

Francesa had enjoyed swapping Knicks stories with the brothers over lunch, and he agreed to the role. When the Uncut Gems trailer arrived in September—much hyped and dissected in various corners of New York internet—it contained almost his entire part. Sandler, playing a sleazy diamond district jeweler named Howard Ratner with debts to settle, approaches Francesa, a bookie named Gary in a pinstripe suit, in a restaurant kitchen; he wants to place a bet. (It was the same Italian restaurant, Francesa said, where he ate with the Safdies. He couldn’t remember which.) “Well I’ll tell you what I know,” Gary says. “That’s the dumbest fucking bet I ever heard of.”

The appearance is one of several ripped-from-the-city roles in the movie, set mostly in Manhattan in 2012. The first-time actor Julia Fox, who grew up in Yorkville, plays Ratner’s girlfriend in a part that Josh Safdie has said was rewritten to hew more closely to her own life. Wayne Diamond, a garment district character with a reportedly mysterious background, is credited as “Handsome Older Man,” and Ratner greets the New York writer Larry “Ratso” Sloman on the street. When the movie isn’t city specific, it’s 2012 specific, or it heads out to Long Island, where Ratner’s family lives. Kevin Garnett plays himself, off the court and in the Celtics games that Ratner bets on. Wearing a glowing pink button down, Ratner walks into the nightclub 1 Oak, where The Weeknd—at the time, a still-rising star—performs an early song. The scene is cued by Meek Mill and Drake’s “Amen,” perhaps making it a contemporary answer to Mean Streets’ red-drenched “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” sequence. (Martin Scorsese executive produced Uncut Gems.) “The Stranger” by Billy Joel plays during another scene.

Among this landscape, Francesa’s Gary is an attitudinal flourish, and maybe a nod to his three decades on tristate airwaves and the sorts of things required for a sports radio host to maintain such a career: steadfast opinion for steadfast opinion’s sake, nuclear-level hyperbole, bold predictions, shameless amnesia, etc. Since 1989, first with Russo and then solo starting in 2008, Francesa has delivered it all in his Nassau County baritone for hours and hours a day.

For listeners like the young Safdies tuning in—whether out of admiration, disdain, or a potent combination of both—it was often indelible. In recent years, Francesa’s become a fixture to another wave of New Yorkers thanks in part to late-night host The Kid Mero’s long-running parody impression on his podcast with Desus Nice, Bodega Boys. Others may follow the Twitter account @BackAftaThis, which tirelessly posts Francesa clips that reveal their internal contradictions or glaring wrongness.

Over the course of our interview, Francesa maintained his trademarks, discussing Sandler’s critically lauded work in the film as if he were a criminally underrated Cy Young candidate.

“You know what amazes me is reading the reviews,” Francesa said, “a lot of the real critics, the guys who consider themselves real artsy critics, start with how awful all Sandler [movies are]—they don't like guys who are popular. They like artsy guys. It offends them when guys are like Sandler who are popular. You know what? He should never apologize for the people liking him.”

Francesa and Sandler had previously met during the actor’s Super Bowl Radio Row stop-ins over the years. There was a baseball game on during a break in Francesa’s day of filming on Uncut Gems, and their trailers were next to one another. “Sandler bangs on the wall,” Francesa recalled, “and he says, ‘Mike.’ So I ducked my head in the trailer. He goes, ‘Do you have satellite?’ I said, ‘No.’ He goes, ‘Well I have the game on, come on out.’ So I said, ‘Oh, thank God.’ So I go.”

“He’s a really serious fan,” Francesa said. “He knows his teams. You can talk to guys that’ll tell you they’re a fan and they don't know anything about the team. He knows his stuff. I mean he’s a real fan. So we were talking about that but really I was just picking his brain about the business. He was explaining a lot of the business to me, ‘cause he has his entourage with him. Listen, I have a driver, but he has a driver, he’s got this guy, that guy, he’s got a whole group of guys, which makes sense. So he’s got all these guys and he was explaining to me how he does his regular movies, and how different this movie was.”

“And this movie,” Francesa added, “he wasn’t getting paid a lot…he just wanted to prove he could do this role, clearly. So it was a big deal for him. Big challenge. And he did an incredible job. I mean, this is no hype.”

He seemed to break character only once. Almost bashfully, Francesa asked if it was plausible to think Sandler had a shot at best actor. He said he’s planning to see Punch Drunk Love, one of Sandler’s previous forays into serious acting, soon.