Timothée Chalamet On Obsession, Chaos And The Making Of Marty Supreme
The Oscar nominated actor sits down for a chat on the unconventional process of making the sports drama
When Timothée Chalamet said that he wanted to be “one of the greats” at his 2025 SAG Awards acceptance speech, many thought he was reaching too far. Is he too overconfident? Does he have the right to say something like this? People asked. By the time Marty Supreme rolled out nine months later, everyone saw his vision.
It almost felt uncanny, when the two words at the centre of Marty Supreme’s promotions were “dream big”. Between Marty Supreme bomber jackets becoming their own fashion moment to Chalamet breaking the internet with his EsDeeKid collaboration, the Josh Safdie directorial is Timothee Chalamet giving it his all to go down in filmmaking history.
The making of the sports drama reflected this obsession since day one. Seven years before it hit theatres, in 2018, Chalamet started training at a 24-hour ping-pong facility in Lower Manhattan. Then COVID hit, and he gutted the living room of his Tribeca apartment to install a full-fledged table tennis setup. Nearly four years before the film went into production, Josh Safdie paid a visit to gauge Chalamet's progress. It led to an impromptu match, where Safdie injured himself. “In my apartment that wasn’t made for table-tennis, he fully sprained his ankle and was limping around for three months,” Chalamet recalls.
“His movies are really off the cuff,” he talks about the making of Marty Supreme. “Usually, a movie of this size is preplanned, but Josh’s strategy is more preplanning everything until it’s chaos,” On a Josh Safdie set, certainty is difficult to come by. There are no rigid storyboards to cling to, no fixed rhythms to fall back on. Instead, Safdie drops his actors into unfamiliar, high-pressure situations and lets instinct take over. Scenes shift, tensions spike, and performances are forced to keep up. “With him, you can't overplan it,” Chalamet adds.
Loosely based on the life of professional ping pong player Marty Reisman, Mart Supreme is about the emotional volatility of chasing excellence, the discipline, the madness, and the moments of chaos that shape extraordinary journeys. Brought to India by PVR Inox Pictures, it is set to hit theatres on 23 January 2023.