In a new interview, “Marty Supreme” actor Timothée Chalamet reveals his commitment to the Marty Mauser character, a table tennis champion, goes back even further than we previously imagined, as he has been dedicated to training for this role since 2018, back before the young actor had even reached star status.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, the pair’s first big interview for the buzzy A24 sports epic (reactions have been glowing), it was revealed that Chalamet had been prepping for the role back in the year that his addiction drama “Beautiful Boy” was released, when he started taking table-tennis lessons at a 24-hour facility in Lower Manhattan. This sort of mirrors a similar dedication to the Bob Dylan role for James Mangold‘s “A Complete Unknown,” that role ended up earning him a Best Actor Oscar nomination earlier this year.
“In my apartment that wasn’t made for table tennis, [Safide] fully sprained his ankle and was limping around for three months,” Chalamet says. Even with other movies needing to be shot, his training didn’t stop. “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.”
“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,” Chalamet said of the intense dedication to the film and making a minor comparison to playing Bob Dylan. “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.”
“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 said of the compelling angle of table tennis from a sports/cinematic point of view. They were also able to recruit Diego Schaaf, who worked on “Forrest Gump” and “Balls of Fury,” to help with the coordination of those vigorous sequences.
Hard to fathom the concept of training for nearly six years to acquire a skill-set for a role, but that is what Chalament did. Anyways, “Marty Supreme” is heading to screens this Christmas. Since we’re now in October, we’re not too far away from that date, and the anticipation couldn’t be greater after the buzz coming out of the New York Film Festival this week.
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