Allen Covert leads cast in ‘Grandma’s Boy’

You probably know Allen Covert as “That Guy from All the Adam Sandler Movies.” But with “Grandma’s Boy,” the 41-year-old actor is finally transitioning from bit parts to leading man status.

“Eventually you want to be on the starting team for a game or two,” Covert says. “I mean, it’s never been anything that’s really been killing me, that I had to do, otherwise I probably would have tried to do it a little earlier.

“I was always having so much fun I never really thought about it, but there’s always the point where it’s like, ‘Hey, I want to do something just to see if you can do it.’ “

From “Happy Gilmore” to “The Wedding Singer” to “The Longest Yard,” Covert has tagged along with Sandler, a former New York University classmate, often putting on weight, shaving his head or donning amusing facial hair.

Frequent visitors to the Happy Madison universe have seen him regularly and still may not recognize him in “Grandma’s Boy,” which opened Friday, a raunchy R-rated comedy that also produced and co-wrote.

“The idea came because my father had had bypass surgery and he lives down in Florida and I went down to help him out for a few weeks after he got out of the hospital,” recalls Covert. “And my 87-year-old grandmother decided that she needed to be there as well just to make sure everything went well.”

“Grandma’s Boy” gives that experience a spin, as Covert plays Alex, a stoner and video game tester who gets kicked out of his apartment and goes to live with his grandmother (Doris Roberts, “Everybody Loves Raymond”) and her eccentric housemates (Shirley Jones, of “The Partridge Family” fame, and Shirley Knight).

The resulting madness includes a karate-trained monkey and a trio of senior citizens getting to go in randy directions not normally explored in studio films.

“When I met with them, they had all read the script, so were all like, ‘Oh yeah, we all want to do this,’ ” says Covert of his three leading ladies. “So I was like, ‘That was the only hurdle I was worried about.’

“If they read that script and said ‘We want in,’ they kind of knew what was happening. They’re comedians. They’re actresses. They want to be funny. They all had a blast.”

Although Covert is carrying the project, he had plenty of help from his “Happy Madison” colleagues during the lengthy journey to raise funds for the film.

“The good news about taking so long to find the money for the movie was that we’d just always go back and go, ‘Ah, let’s go back and look at the script again,’ ” he says.

“And we would just keep tweaking and then you’d let Sandler read it and he’d come up with like 100 billion great jokes like, ‘What if the grandma does this …’ “

While Sandler gave a behind-the-scenes assist (he also told the filmmakers not to worry about toning things down for a PG-13 rating), he doesn’t appear in the film. Plenty of other familiar faces drop by for cameos, though, including Rob Schneider, Kevin Nealon and David Spade.

Which forces the obvious question: Is it easier acting opposite Schneider or a chimp?

“Wow,” Covert pauses. “That’s a tough one. No. Schneider. You know why? Because Schneider has never pooped his diaper in the middle of a scene, which the monkey did a couple times, and he’s never actually just ignored what I was saying and walked away, which the monkey also did.”