On Monday night, an auditorium of movie lovers at the New York Film Festival were treated to the secret world premiere of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. Loosely based on the life of ping-pong great Marty Reisman, the film stars Timothée Chalamet as the fictional Marty Mauser, a table tennis wiz coming up in 1950s New York City with the hyper-determination to become a world champion. The post-premiere reactions were nothing short of laudatory. Words like “epic” and “masterful” were thrown around, and Chalamet’s performance earned immediate Oscar buzz and praise such as “career best” and “performance of a lifetime.”
To those that got to see Marty Supreme this week — I don’t care that something good happened to you, it should have happened to me instead (as the saying goes). The rest of us will have to wait until the film comes out on Christmas, an excruciating 77 days from now. But if there is one balm, it’s that the next two-and-a-half months will feature one of the greatest shows contemporary Hollywood has to offer: A Timothée Chalamet press tour.
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And it’s already off to a rousing start. Following the premiere, Chalamet’s first interview about the film emerged, with the actor telling The Hollywood Reporter that he’s spent the past several years secretly working on his ping-pong skills, even as he filmed other movies.
“I had a table in London while I was making Wonka,” he said. “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.”
(Astute Chalamet watchers will know this means he was training while also learning the Bob Dylan oeuvre for A Complete Unknown. As noted in a Rolling Stone cover story last year, there are videos of him singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” while in his Paul Atreides costume, as well as playing guitar in his Willy Wonka outfit.)
All that said, interviews with trade publications are pretty standard press tour fare, especially this early on. The real start of the Chalamet/Marty Supreme press tour came Tuesday night when the actor shared an incredible and absurd five-minute promo video. It’s shot in a field at dusk, there are people in all black outfits with giant orange ping-pong balls for heads playing table tennis. Chalamet himself is locked in a glass box, wearing a similar orange head, plus a custom Marty Supreme track suit, being pelted by ping-pong balls. All of this is soundtracked to a delirious industrial beat laced with samples from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back quotes (most prominently, Jason Mewes’ “I am the clit commander” monologue).
Eventually, Chalamet escapes his glass box, removes his ping-pong ball head, reveals a fresh buzz cut (possibly, probably, maybe for Dune 3), and hoofs it over to a nearby warehouse. There, the music switches to distant, classical pomp and the actor takes a seat at a tidy press junket-style set. The camera zooms closer, the music cuts, and Chalamet finally speaks: “Marty Supreme is an American film that comes out on Christmas 2025.”
Folks, that’s how you do it. Chalamet has rightfully received all kinds of plaudits as a generational acting talent, but he’s also proving to be a generational celebrity talent: someone as fun to watch on the big screen, as all the other tinier ones we stare at every day.
While he’s always been good at this part of the job, it was last year’s A Complete Unknown press tour that showed Chalamet was operating on a different level from many of his rising star peers. He showed off his elite ball knowledge on ESPN’s College GameDay and discussed growing up in Mitchell-Lama housing on Theo Von’s podcast. At one New York event, he cosplayed as Dylan from the 2003 Sundance premiere of Masked and Anonymous, showing up with a blonde wig, blue beanie, and gray checkered scarf. He performed three Dylan deep cuts with James Blake on Saturday Night Live, and filmed himself singing and dancing along to all seven-minutes-and-30-seconds of “Visions of Johanna” on a frosty NYC morning on a pier overlooking the Hudson River.
It was goofy, it was fun, it was entertaining. And Chalamet never once came across as grating, obnoxious, or desperate. A Complete Unknown was also, arguably, the first time Chalamet had the chance to lead a press tour like this, as the central focus and load-bearing star. Dune and Dune 2 were bigger movies, but they also had Zendaya, large ensemble casts, and the oomph of one of the most revered sci-fi novels of all time. Wonka was a kids movie based on familiar IP.
That’s not to suggest a rock biopic about one of the most lauded singer-songwriters of the 20th century doesn’t come with some of the same built-in, risk-averse qualities. But Chalamet’s press tour worked because it created some crucial distance from the self-seriousness that inevitably weighs down many of those films. Underpinning all his goofiness was an utterly sincere and infectious confidence and belief in A Complete Unknown, and a genuine desire to share it with as many people as possible.
Clearly, he feels the same way about Marty Supreme. It’s a movie he’s been preparing for since 2018, and if it’s going to succeed, Chalamet is going to have to sell the absolute hell out of it.
Marty does have other things going for it, sure: It’s an A24 release and the studio has its fans; it’s Josh Safdie’s first feature since Uncut Gems (which he co-directed with his brother, Benny); and it’ll boast Gwyneth Paltrow’s first on-screen film performance since Avengers: Endgame.
But it’s also, effectively, an indie movie with an original story. Even if Marty is loosely based on a real person and events, the NYC table tennis scene of the 1950s isn’t exactly Greenwich Village of the 1960s; there’s little shared cultural history for Chalamet to reference or play with. But this also leaves the promotional possibilities so wide open, it feels pointless to even speculate on what Chalamet’s cooking for what could be the first real test of his star power.
A week ago, no one could’ve envisioned the deranged ping-pong video set to the Jay and Silent Bob remix. Well, except for maybe Chalamet.
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