While “Avatar: Fire & Ash” has dominated the box office conversation for good reason, Josh Safdie‘s buzzy “Marty Supreme” starring Oscar-nominee Timothée Chalamet (“A Complete Unknown”) is doing well over the holiday season for a smaller character-driven dramedy (becoming the second biggest opening for an A24 movie at $27 million over first four days) focusing on a ping-pong hustler in the 1950s trying to make himself famous, anyway he can. The movie, from one half of the directing duo behind “Uncut Gems,” has some equally provocative sequences, and Chamalet wasn’t interested in having a butt double for one of those scenes.
According to co-star/reality TV host Kevin O’Leary (“Shark Tank”), while chatting with Variety, Chalamet refused the idea of using a butt double for a scene where Marty is spanked with a table tennis paddle by his character, recalling those events and the exhausting amount of takes they did.
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“When it came time to whack him, there was a stunt ass. There was a double,” O’Leary said. “[Chalamet] wouldn’t do it. He said he’ll do it himself. He didn’t want some other ass immortalized.”
As O’Leary tells those events, he was supposed to use a fake paddle to soften the blow on Chalamet’s rear end, but the prop paddle ended up immediately breaking on the first hit. They ended up using a real one instead, so the shot would work, and O’Leary says recording that scene “went on for hours,” with the directing supposedly demanding about 40 takes until 4 am (hopefully, Chalamet was able to recover).
“Josh was saying, ‘You’ve got to wind up harder,'” O’Leary called to Variety. “I was really whacking him.” He called the spanking scene “a pivotal scene of humiliation” for Chalamet’s Marty, which was necessary for the cocky table tennis hustler to be knocked down a peg.
This wacky behind-the-scenes tidbit comes after Chalamet made some boastful claims during the film’s promotional tour, including suggesting a Best Actor Oscar win for his performance in “Marty Supreme” is a foregone conclusion, even before the nominations have been made official by the Academy.
“Marty Supreme” is currently in theaters, and you can read The Playlist’s review right here, alongside the film being part of our “25 Best Films Of 2025” list.
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