Mitchell Wenig and his brother Stewart briefly appeared as brothers in the Safdie brothers’ 2019 smash Uncut Gems. They’re not professional actors: Mitchell collects celebrity autographs, and Stewart is an amateur musician whose recordings sometimes include Mitchell. Their experience on the Uncut Gems set inspired them to write and record an album’s worth of music that, much to Stewart’s chagrin, didn’t make it into the movie.
The Wenigs are really funny in Uncut Gems, and Safdie also admittedly likes that Mitchell was friends with Johnny Ramone. Safdie told GQ:
For my birthday, he bought me a great gift: a gold record, a seven inch of a surf band that I didn’t know, but it was from the producer’s office, so it was clearly some estate sale. And it was very meaningful for him to give that to me. And I bother him because he was friends with Johnny Ramone and they would trade posters and autographs. He’s just a great hang. I love talking to him and he has a very unique way of talking and thinking.
So when it was time for Josh Safdie to cast his newest solo endeavor Marty Supreme, he invited Mitchell back for another small role, as Abel Ferrara’s character Ezra Mishkin’s henchman. Stewart isn’t in Marty Supreme, but Safdie says he tried to sneak into the movie and is “really aggro” about trying to get his music into his films. He told Vanity Fair:
Stewart’s a whole thing. I’m close with Mitchell; I don’t really know Stewart at all. Stewart is kind of aggro about getting his music into the movies. They make music together.
I love Mitchell. I love having him around. He makes me happy. And he knows he’s funny, so he’s incapable of saying a line that’s not uniquely him…. I always thought, Oh, that’d be cool to cast him as someone kind of scary, and I wanted to bring him back. But his brother was on set every single fucking day, and he snuck onto the set of the Ping-Pong parlor, because he’s good at table tennis. But he was wearing 2025 clothing, with a hat and everything, and long hair, and he was just playing in the background. I go, “Stuart, what are you doing in the shot?” He goes, “What? I’m good enough.” I said, “Look, it’s a period [film]!” He goes, “It doesn’t work?”
So Stewart, again, decided to make another album, but this time he didn’t bring it to Safdie. He presented the CD to his latest muse, Marty star Odessa A’zion.
Safdie explains on a new episode of Stavros Halkias’ podcast:
I was at Odessa’s house shooting this thing for promo or whatever, a tour of her house. And she’s like, “Oh, this is the CD that Stewart made!” I was like, “He didn’t give me a CD.” And then we played it, and it was like a whole album about Odessa. It was just like about how he loved her character, the muse.
The director also tells Halkias that he had to explain to Mitchell that it was a bad look for him to ask costar Gwyneth Paltrow for an autograph. Safdie shared an excerpt of the Wenig’s Uncut Gems album back in 2020, but the A’zion album is still under wraps for now. See Safdie talk about it below.
Here’s a tease of one of the songs from Stuart (and to some@extent Mitch) Wenig’s UNCUT GEMS full 10 track album made for the film… spoiler: it’s amazing. R. Stevie Moore-esque pic.twitter.com/hpbfE9AR0g
— SAFDIE (@JOSH_BENNY) January 17, 2020