<\/p>\n
When Timoth\u00e9e 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 \u201caura\u201d 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. \u201cMy friend said he was on acid \u2014 I\u2019ll throw him under the bus,\u201d Chalamet clarifies with a laugh. But later in his chat with The Hollywood Reporter, Chalamet acknowledges the friend may not have been alone: \u201cI might have said it, too, honestly. I can\u2019t remember.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIt totally shifted my brain,\u201d Safdie says. \u201cI had been like, \u2018Wow, this guy\u2019s trying to be this big actor, showing up at this party tripping on acid.\u2019 But he played it so well \u2014 I believed it. It was really good acting. And so I was like, \u2018OK, this is a weird dude.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
More from The Hollywood Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n An auspicious creative partnership was born out of that innocent lie, with Chalamet now starring in Safdie\u2019s 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\u2019s most proven movie stars, nabbing two Oscar nominations and leading box office smashes like the Dune franchise and last year\u2019s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s other major fall release, The Smashing Machine, and Marty Supreme marking Josh\u2019s first solo-directed film since his 2008 debut, The Pleasure of Being Robbed.<\/p>\n \u201cEmotionally, it was different \u2014 you spend so much time directing with one person \u2014 but it felt natural in some ways,\u201d Josh says, citing the return of frequent collaborators like co-writer and editor Ronald Bronstein and cinematographer Darius Khondji. \u201cLuckily, I was overwhelmed in a great way with the incredible world-building of this project. There\u2019s this epic undertaking, spanning over 150 characters and speaking parts and tons of locations and having to shoot incredibly long hours. I really didn\u2019t have much time to reflect about anything but which five or 10 extras I wanted to be in the corner of the frame \u2014 and how to convince them to be real people.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, Safdie made Marty Supreme on a budget more than double of any of his previous films \u2014 it\u2019s reportedly A24\u2019s most expensive project to date, at around $70 million \u2014 mounting an American period epic as only he could.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Safdie started playing table tennis as a kid, following in the footsteps of generations of his family. He learned about legendary \u201ceccentric Jewish immigrant Lower East Side characters\u201d who\u2019d play at his grandparents\u2019 kitchen table after Shabbat dinner. \u201cIt opened my eyes to this fascinating subculture of misfits who all congregated in New York and played for money all the time,\u201d he says. \u201cYou have this thing that\u2019s so meaningful to you and means nothing to other people.\u201d In 2018, his wife, Sara Rossein (an executive producer and researcher on the film), picked up a copy of The Money Player, the memoir by \u201850s table-tennis champion Marty Reisman, at a thrift store. She figured Safdie would be into it.<\/p>\n \u201cIt had this kind of funky-looking guy on the cover,\u201d Safdie recalls. \u201cI showed it to Timmy because he and I were talking at the very beginning of all of this. I said to him, \u2018I want to do a movie in this world. Check out what this player looks like.\u2019 He\u2019s like, \u2018Holy shit, that looks like me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019d played a musical icon and a bisexual cannibal, Willy Wonka and King Henry V. But this next challenge \u2014 taking on an aspiring table-tennis world champion \u2014 required a uniquely rigorous commitment to start before any of those projects would be completed. It also required Chalamet to get a little weird \u2014 which, yeah, Safdie knew he was up for.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 again, four years out from actually making the movie \u2014 and as they played, wound up hurting himself. \u201cIn my apartment that wasn\u2019t made for table-tennis, he fully sprained his ankle and was limping around for three months,\u201d Chalamet says.<\/p>\n After the pandemic lockdowns, Chalamet got pretty busy with other movies. This did not mean he stopped training. \u201cEverything 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.\u201d<\/p>\n For those familiar with Chalamet\u2019s similarly intensive years-long prep to play Dylan in A Complete Unknown, he hears you may be skeptical \u2014 and will soon put any and all doubts to rest. \u201cIf anyone thinks this is cap, as the kids say \u2014 if anyone thinks this is made up \u2014 this is all documented, and it\u2019ll be put out,\u201d he says. \u201cThese 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019t taken advantage of table tennis\u2019s cinematic pacing. \u201cIt\u2019s not that different from boxing \u2014 they\u2019re battling each other in a relatively small, constrained place, and it\u2019s a mind game,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I reached out to him, \u2018He\u2019s like, yeah, I\u2019ve done this before, but it seems like you\u2019re making a very different type of film,\u2019\u201d Safdie says.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n And what type of film is Marty Supreme? It\u2019s certainly still a Safdie movie \u2014 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.<\/p>\n In the end, this is not a biopic of Marty Reisman, even if some biographical details are peppered into the story in \u201chomage,\u201d as Safdie puts it. \u201cHe was my entry point into the world.\u201d Instead, the film, set in 1952, follows the fictional Marty Mauser, grinding it in New York\u2019s 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.\u00a0His 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.<\/p>\n \u201cMy goal was to make it as large as I possibly could,\u201d Safdie says. \u201cI wanted to honor Marty Mauser\u2019s 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 \u2014 and I had to act that way because I was making it from Marty\u2019s point of view.\u201d Marty being a Jewish American hurtling toward a major global spectacle \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m Hitler\u2019s worst nightmare,\u201d he muses at one point \u2014 also puts him in a position of fascinating historical significance. \u201cHe\u2019s accidentally claiming some sort of diplomacy between him and [Koto], just based on his own dream and this other guy\u2019s own dream,\u201d Safdie says.<\/p>\n Along the way, Marty encounters a wild range of New York characters. There\u2019s 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\u2019zion); and Milton Rockwell (Kevin O\u2019Leary, 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\u2019Leary, who\u2019s also become something of a President Trump ally on cable news, had never acted as anyone but himself before \u2014 but makes a vivid impression as the movie\u2019s de facto villain. \u201cI needed someone who you did not like, and did not like in a deep, unconscious way,\u201d Safdie says. \u201cI 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\u2019s going to be an asshole. But that\u2019s what\u2019s so fun about him \u2014 you enjoy watching him be a dick.\u201d<\/p>\n In the film, Rockwell is married to Kay Stone, an old Hollywood star mulling a return to acting \u2014 while launching into an unlikely affair with Marty. She\u2019s portrayed by a magnetic Gwyneth Paltrow, in the Oscar winner\u2019s first onscreen role in five years. \u201cShe was incredible. I felt it with Christian Bale as well \u2014 when I work with these people whose work I grew up on, who are masters,\u201d Chalamet says. \u201cIt\u2019s the way you would feel if you were in drama class on 48th Street, and you\u2019re in an exercise, and you literally go, \u2018Wow, I\u2019m working with an amazing artist.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n But this is fundamentally Chalamet\u2019s movie. You sense he feels this character in his bones \u2014 a New York kid of wide-eyed ambition with a vision for conquering the world, and who will stop at nothing to get there. \u201cIn spirit, this is the most who I was that I\u2019ve had to play a role. This is who I was before I had a career,\u201d Chalamet says. \u201cSome 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\u2019t 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 \u2014 at the time, it was kind of radical, the choices I was making when I was 20.<\/p>\n \u201cIn a sense, the story of Marty Mauser is really comparative,\u201d Chalamet adds. \u201cAnd so I was deeply moved by it.\u201d<\/p>\n Best of The Hollywood Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for THR’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source uk.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Timoth\u00e9e 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 \u201caura\u201d around Chalamet, who broke out that year for his performance in Call Me by Your Name, and then some confusion: As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2076094,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[389794,328254,344055,343972,328117,343974,31190,34943],"class_list":["post-2076093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-chalamet","tag-josh-safdie","tag-marty-mauser","tag-marty-reisman","tag-marty-supreme","tag-table-tennis","tag-the-hollywood-reporter","tag-timothee-chalamet"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/This-Is-Who-I-Was-Before-I-Had-a-Career.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2076093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2076093"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2076093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2076095,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2076093\/revisions\/2076095"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2076094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2076093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2076093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2076093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}