Timothée Chalamet and Josh Safdie Talk Marty Supreme

When Timothée Chalamet met Josh Safdie at a New York party in 2017, the then-22-year-old rising star was sitting in a corner with a friend and acting a little strange. Safdie sensed an “aura” around Chalamet, who broke out that year for his performance in Call Me by Your Name, and then some confusion: As he remembers it, Chalamet told him he was tripping on acid. “My friend said he was on acid — I’ll throw him under the bus,” Chalamet clarifies with a laugh. But later in his chat with The Hollywood Reporter, Chalamet acknowledges the friend may not have been alone: “I might have said it too, honestly. I can’t remember.” 

Either way, nobody was actually on acid. Two years later, Chalamet admitted to Safdie that regardless of where the bit started and ended, it was fully made up. “It totally shifted my brain,” Safdie says. “I had been like, ‘Wow, this guy’s trying to be this big actor, showing up at this party tripping on acid.’ But he played it so well — I believed it. It was really good acting. And so I was like, ‘Okay, this is a weird dude.’”

An auspicious creative partnership was born out of that innocent lie, with Chalamet now starring in Safdie’s Marty Supreme. (The film hits theaters via A24 on Christmas Day, and screened Monday night as a secret New York Film Festival premiere to rave reactions.) In the eight years since their charmingly odd intro, Chalamet has emerged as one of his generation’s most proven movie stars, nabbing two Oscar nominations and leading box-office smashes like the Dune franchise and last year’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.

Safdie, meanwhile, built his own profile alongside his brother and former directing partner, Benny. Following up on smaller critical darlings like Heaven Knows What and Good Time, 2019’s Uncut Gems won them the Independent Spirit Award for best director and is now an oft-quoted modern New York classic. The siblings recently went their separate creative ways, though, with Benny helming A24’s other major fall release, The Smashing Machine, and Marty Supreme marking Josh’s first solo-directed film since his 2008 debut, The Pleasure of Being Robbed.

“Emotionally, it was different — you spend so much time directing with one person — but it felt natural in some ways,” Josh says, citing the return of frequent collaborators like co-writer and editor Ronald Bronstein and cinematographer Darius Khondji. “Luckily, I was overwhelmed in a great way with the incredible world-building of this project. There’s this epic undertaking, spanning over 150 characters and speaking parts and tons of locations and having to shoot incredibly long hours. I really didn’t have much time to reflect about anything but which 5 or 10 extras I wanted to be in the corner of the frame — and how to convince them to be real people.” 

Indeed, Safdie made Marty Supreme on a budget more than double of any of his previous films — it’s reportedly A24’s most expensive project to date, at around $70 million — mounting an American period epic as only he could.

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Safdie started playing table tennis as a kid, following in the footsteps of generations of his family. He learned about legendary “eccentric Jewish immigrant Lower East Side characters” who’d play at his grandparents’ kitchen table after Shabbat dinner. “It opened my eyes to this fascinating subculture of misfits who all congregated in New York and played for money all the time,” he says. “You have this thing that’s so meaningful to you and means nothing to other people.” In 2018, his wife, Sara Rossien (an executive producer and researcher on the film), picked up a copy of The Money Player, the memoir by ‘50s table-tennis champion Marty Reisman, at a thrift store. She figured Safdie would be into it.

“It had this kind of funky-looking guy on the cover,” Safdie recalls. “I showed it to Timmy because he and I were talking at the very beginning of all of this. I said to him, ‘I want to do a movie in this world. Check out what this player looks like.’ He’s like, ‘Holy shit, that looks like me.’”

The project was far from greenlit, but as soon as Chalamet heard about the possibility of working with Safdie, he dove in headfirst. Marty Supreme threw him into uncharted territory. Coming into the film, he’d played a musical icon and a bisexual cannibal, Willy Wonka and King Henry V. But this next challenge — taking on an aspiring table-tennis world champion — required a uniquely rigorous commitment to start before any of those projects would be completed. It also required Chalamet to get a little weird — which, yeah, Safdie knew he was up for. 

In 2018, Chalamet started taking ping-pong lessons at a 24-hour facility in Lower Manhattan. During COVID, he got rid of his living-room furniture at his Tribeca home and replaced it with a full table-tennis setup. Safdie came by one day to assess his skill level — again, four years out from actually making the movie — and as they played, wound up hurting himself. “In my apartment that wasn’t made for table-tennis, he fully sprained his ankle and was limping around for three months,” Chalamet says.

After the pandemic lockdowns, Chalamet got pretty busy with other movies. This did not mean he stopped training. “Everything I was working on, it was this secret: I had a table in London while I was making Wonka. On Dune 2, I had a table in Budapest, Jordan. I had a table in Abu Dhabi. I had a table at the Cannes Film Festival for The French Dispatch. I got myself an Airbnb in a town [around] Saint-Tropez after The French Dispatch, overlooking the water, and I was taking lessons there.”

For those familiar with Chalamet’s similarly intensive years-long prep to play Dylan in A Complete Unknown, he hears you may be skeptical — and will soon put any and all doubts to rest. “If anyone thinks this is cap, as the kids say — if anyone thinks this is made up — this is all documented, and it’ll be put out,” he says. “These were the two spoiled projects where I got years to work on them. This is the truth. I was working on both these things concurrently.”

The work shows. Safdie shoots the table-tennis sequences with breathtaking vigor, often capturing Chalamet dominating matches in long, single takes. Widely celebrated for his unbearably tense filmmaking, Safdie brings that immediacy to these scenes in a way that makes you wonder why more films haven’t taken advantage of table tennis’s cinematic pacing. “It’s not that different from boxing — they’re battling each other in a relatively small, constrained place, and it’s a mind game,” Safdie says. The director sought out an expert on table-tennis, Diego Schaaf, to handle all coordination. Schaaf has worked on everything from the brief ping-pong scene in Forrest Gump to the 2007 comedy Balls of Fury, one of the few films to center the sport. 

“When I reached out to him, ‘He’s like, yeah, I’ve done this before, but it seems like you’re making a very different type of film,’” Safdie says.

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And what type of film is Marty Supreme? It’s certainly still a Safdie movie — this thing moves fast, its feel for dread and anxiety swelling by the minute, while relishing every second spent playing in its gritty New York sandbox. But Safdie has applied that signature aesthetic to a story of much grander scope, of an American misfit who dreams big.

In the end, this is not a biopic of Marty Reisman, even if some biographical details are peppered into the story for “homage,” as Safdie puts it. “He was my entry point into the world.” Instead, the film, set in 1952, follows the fictional Marty Mauser, grinding it in New York’s table-tennis scene and on the precipice of a major break. He sells shoes on the side to make a living, but is determined to prove himself as the world champion of a sport most in his life consider a joke. He talks a big game and is recklessly relentless in pursuit of his goal.  His odyssey to cobble together the money to fly to Japan and defeat his great rival, Koto Endo (played by real-life table-tennis champion Koto Kawaguchi), gets scaled up to a sweeping, evocative period drama.

“My goal was to make it as large as I possibly could,” Safdie says. “I wanted to honor Marty Mauser’s dream to make it the greatest sport in the world. I like imagining an alternative path of history where the sport did become as big as tennis — and I had to act that way because I was making it from Marty’s point of view.” Marty being a Jewish American hurtling toward a major global spectacle — “I’m Hitler’s worst nightmare,” he muses at one point — also puts him in a position of fascinating historical significance. “He’s accidentally claiming some sort of diplomacy between him and [Koto], just based on his own dream and this other guy’s own dream,” Safdie says. 

Along the way, Marty encounters a wild range of New York characters. There’s his difficult mother (Fran Drescher); his partner in occasionally literal crime, Wally (Tyler, the Creator, in his acting debut); his dynamic and equally crafty girlfriend, Rachel (a breakout Odessa A’zion); and Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary, of Shark Tank), who runs an ink-pen empire (you read that correctly) and gets hooked onto table-tennis after a run-in with Marty. O’Leary, who’s also become something of a President Trump ally on cable news, had never acted as anyone but himself before — but makes a vivid impression as the movie’s de facto villain. “I needed someone who you did not like, and did not like in a deep, unconscious way,” Safdie says. “I looked at a lot of real businessmen and people who have no history of being on camera. Kevin in particular on Shark Tank is always the guy who’s going to be an asshole. But that’s what’s so fun about him — you enjoy watching him be a dick.”

In the film, Rockwell is married to Kay Stone, an Old Hollywood star mulling a return to acting — while launching into an unlikely affair with Marty. She’s portrayed by a magnetic Gwyneth Paltrow, in the Oscar winner’s first on-screen role in five years. “She was incredible. I felt it with Christian Bale as well — when I work with these people whose work I grew up on, who are masters,” Chalamet says. “It’s the way you would feel if you were in drama class on 48th Street, and you’re in an exercise, and you literally go, ‘Wow, I’m working with an amazing artist.’”

But this is fundamentally Chalamet’s movie. You sense he feels this character in his bones — a New York kid of wide-eyed ambition with a vision for conquering the world, and who will stop at nothing to get there. “In spirit, this is the most who I was that I’ve had to play a role. This is who I was before I had a career,” Chalamet says. “Some people are fortunate enough to stumble into their success or be passive about their pursuit of whatever they want to do in life. That wasn’t it for me. For me, it was putting in the 10,000 hours. It was dropping out of college. It was taking a risk. It was pursuing projects that were untraditional at first — at the time, it was kind of radical, the choices I was making when I was 20.”

“In a sense, the story of Marty Mauser is really comparative,” Chalamet adds. “And so I was deeply moved by it.”