Timothée Chalamet sure is good at playing idiosyncratic young men who are annoyingly unshakable in their self-belief. The latest is Marty Mauser, “a young man with a dream no one respects”: To be a table tennis champion. In the newly released trailer for Josh Safdie’s period piece Marty Supreme, Marty “goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness,” per the synopsis. The film premieres December 25, Chalamet’s third Christmas release in the last three years.
Like Marty, Chalamet has also declared himself “in pursuit of greatness,” as he put it during a SAG Awards speech earlier this year. “I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats,” he said. But maybe that was Marty bleeding into Timmy; the actor has, after all, been preparing for this role since 2018, training vigorously to be a convincing ping pong champ. “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,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. (Intriguingly, Chalamet says the overlapping prep between Marty Supreme and A Complete Unknown—where he played another obstinately talented rising star—was “all documented, and it’ll be put out.”)
Marty Supreme also stars Gwyneth Paltrow as an older movie star with whom Marty strikes up an affair; Odessa A’Zion as his neighborhood love; Kevin O’Leary, a.k.a. Shark Tank‘s Mr. Wonderful as an investor in Marty’s talent; Tyler Okonma, a.k.a. Tyler, The Creator, as Marty’s friend and fellow hustler; as well as Abel Ferrara and Fran Drescher. And at the center is Chalamet, playing a character who “is the most who I was that I’ve had to play a role. This is who I was before I had a career,” he told THR. “In a sense, the story of Marty Mauser is really comparative. And so I was deeply moved by it.”
