Timothée Chalamet took home the top prize for best actor in a comedy/musical at the Golden Globes this month, beating out Leonardo DiCaprio, and making him the front runner for an Oscar award come March this year.
The tall, lanky, talented young actor who has become quite a fashion icon, is frenetic in Marty Supreme – a story of 1950s table tennis contender Marty Mauser who believes he can be the best in the world, given the chance. The film showcases the reality that many athletes face. Focused on perfecting their craft, they also have to eke out a living to come up with the money to enter tournaments and pay for travel and accommodation. The film’s tagline is: Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.
The film centres on Marty’s relentless, kinetic drive to see his dream come true. While some have called the character annoying and frustrating, the fact that you root for him is a tribute to Chalamet’s talent.
The script was good enough to pull Gwyneth Paltrow back to the big screen. She portrays Kay Stone, a former actress stuck in the restrictions of her time; she’s the arm candy of a tycoon who could fund Marty and make his dream of being proclaimed the best in the world come true. In her way, Kay is also pursing a dream. She wants to return to the stage and she recognises Marty’s powerful drive to achieve some level of greatness.
It’s a refreshing turn to watch a film about an older woman engaged in an affair with a younger man – she isn’t looking for love but wants the adrenaline of a younger man’s illicit attention. Newcomer Odessa A’zion delivers a star turn as Marty’s married (to someone else), pregnant (by him) girlfriend. Marty’s relentless pushing of boundaries and exploitation of everyone is exhausting - he moves as fast as the ball that he has to keep in play to achieve supremacy on the table tennis circuit. The film is directed by Josh Safdie who rose to acclaim with the film Uncut Gems starring Adam Sandler.
Chalamet is one of the most respected actors of his generation. George Clooney even recognised him as one of the new movie stars of this era. He’s known for his commercial fare, he played Paul Atreides in Dune, but he’s also wracked up an impressive body of work collaborating with top directors including Luca Guadagnino, Greta Gerwig, Denis Villeneuve, Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan. Many felt he should have been awarded the Oscar for last year’s A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic.
“Marty Supreme is the most ‘me’,” says Chalamet. “He reminds me of myself before I had a successful career. I say that delicately because he’s not the most admirable character but he is very motivated to achieve his goals.” Chalamet says he felt that element of the character was what he related to the most, “This sort of fierce determination and drive to get to where I wanted to be in my career, and not take ‘no’ for an answer. This is especially important in the film industry, where there’s so much rejection as you come out the gate. Really, the only person believing in you is you at the jump. More than any other character, Marty is the most animalistic person I’ve portrayed.”
While other actors are blasé about the effort it can sometimes take to inhabit a character (often for years in preparation for a role), Chalamet was recently harassed on social media for saying that he wants to deliver the greatest performances he can.
He was criticised for comparing himself to an athlete wanting to be the best. He received similar fallout after he won a SAG award for his portrayal of Bob Dylan - he even did his own singing. He invested over five years of his life to deliver the Oscar-nominated performance –but some critics prefer the misconception that, if you’re good, acting is effortless.
The 30-year-old is aware of the backlash, but is inspired by Marty Supreme to share his personal vision. “Between the ages of 22 and 26, when my career was really taking off, I felt like the rug got pulled out from under me. I’m proud of Call Me by Your Name and Beautiful Boy, those early movies I did, but at that stage, before people knew me as an actor, there weren’t that many demands made on me. There weren’t as many distractions from the outside world. Starting with A Complete Unknown and continuing with Marty Supreme, there are a lot more distractions for me to ignore but I realise that acting is a gift which I want to pursue at the highest level and share with everyone. I had to lock in on a role like this and silence the noise in my life now.”
Adding to this “noise” is his relationship with Kylie Jenner who he thanked in his Golden Globes acceptance speech, saying, ‘To my partner who I love … ‘.
He’s watched and learned from his acting peers. “I’ve been living in fear, watching actors’ protecting this gift or - alternatively - living without care for their gift, being reckless with it; living off the candy of life, in a sense. I don’t wanna take either of those paths. I want to honour the gift of a life in performance, working as an actor and doing my best.”
Portraying Marty transformed Chalamet’s vision of his chosen profession. “Because of Marty I’ve felt a transmutation - the ability to admit that I’m in the pursuit of greatness the way Marty Mauser was. I say that with all humility. The lifestyle of an actor and the demands that come with it are too bizarre to do anything but want to be the best too.”
More than any other character, Marty is the most animalistic person I’ve portrayed.
— Timothée Chalamet
The bilingual actor (he has a French father), who spent summers in the South of France as a child, wore contact lenses to mess with his vision, and glasses to correct the effect of the contact lenses while portraying Marty. He sat through hours of prosthetic application to mimic acne. He then had to learn the choreography of the table tennis greats - for 80% of the games the ball was added digitally in post production.
Chalamet’s grandmother, mother, and sister danced in the New York City ballet. He grew up backstage watching the greats perform, and credits this experience for his ability to achieve the fluidity of an athlete in the gruelling re-enactments of competitive games. Chalamet is unaware that his education sets him apart as he casually alludes to ‘Venn diagrams’, uses words like ‘transmutation’, and references cultural influences like George Balanchine (Georgian-American ballet choreographer) in our interview.
When asked what stayed with him after he’d wrapped up shooting Marty Supreme, he hesitates and then clearly reverting to character, he musters the energy of Marty in the reply: “The assertiveness and the confidence. I want to look back on my interviews and say, ‘man, I wasn’t afraid of the truth’.” He pauses again as though digging deep into his psyche to manifest Marty, “That said, I feel like this is my best performance after seven or eight years of handing in committed, top-of-the-line performances. The discipline and the work ethic isn’t something I want to take for granted.”
After that, he collapses in on himself, having released the character and reverted to the man. I share Clooney’s comments with him, and he’s clearly flabbergasted. “Wow. That’s incredible.” He smiles. “I needed more confidence.” After that statement, you realise that all the self proclamations are projections and mantras to guide his quest to be a great actor - fake it until you make it. Frame the vision, and perhaps the Oscar award will follow.
