{"id":366793,"date":"2025-12-24T03:51:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-24T03:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/366793\/"},"modified":"2025-12-24T03:51:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T03:51:07","slug":"timothee-chalamets-is-great-in-the-movie-hes-even-better-outside-of-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/366793\/","title":{"rendered":"Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet\u2019s is great in the movie. He\u2019s even better outside of it."},"content":{"rendered":"

I can\u2019t remember the precise moment, but somewhere between\u00a0Marty Supreme\u2019s ecstatic surprise premiere at the New York Film Festival and the point where A24 sent a bright orange blimp to float over Los Angeles, I formed the thought,\u00a0Oh, they actually want this to make money. The solo directing debut of Josh Safdie,\u00a0Marty, which stars Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet as an abrasive hustler who becomes convinced his most direct route to fame and fortune runs through the world of professional ping-pong, is very much in the mold of the movies Josh made with his brother, Benny, especially\u00a0Heaven Knows What,\u00a0Good Time, and\u00a0Uncut Gems, all stories of low-life strivers counting down the moments until disaster catches up with them. But, though it has the scuzzy, scuffed-up look of the Safdies\u2019 low-budget landmarks,\u00a0Marty\u2019s period setting and epic scope\u2014the story takes Marty to, among other places, Japan, Egypt, and the Balkans\u2014required a reported budget of at least $60 million (some estimates go as high as $90 million), which is $10 million more than\u00a0Uncut Gems, by far the brothers\u2019 biggest box-office success, grossed in its entire theatrical run.<\/p>\n

Of course,\u00a0Marty Supreme\u00a0has a not-so-secret weapon in its leading man, who may be the biggest, and certainly the most enthusiastic, movie star of his generation. Few people relish public attention as unabashedly as Chalamet does, or seem as deft at navigating its pitfalls without major missteps. His Best Actor nomination for last year\u2019s\u00a0A Complete Unknown<\/a>\u00a0made him the youngest man to score a second nom since James Dean in 1957, but Chalamet is as extroverted as Dean was withdrawn. Whether he\u2019s\u00a0rapping on\u00a0Saturday Night Live<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0laying down college-football commentary<\/a>\u00a0like a seasoned pro, he blossoms in the spotlight rather than shrinking from it. He makes being a movie star look fun.<\/p>\n

Marty Supreme, which Safdie co-wrote with Ronald Bronstein, is a downbeat fable about the dark side of the American dream, run through with the understanding that there are few paths to financial success and public approbation for a young Jewish man from the tenements of New York in the 1950s. But it\u2019s also, for all the seedy locales stuffed into its 2\u00bd hours, a bit of a romp, buoyed by the repugnant charisma of Chalamet\u2019s performance, as well as a star-studded supporting cast that includes Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A\u2019Zion, and Tyler Okonma, aka Tyler, the Creator. Marty is a genuine talent, good enough to, early in the movie, get himself all the way to the finals of the table tennis world championship. But he only gets to the championship by stealing money from his uncle and abandoning the married girlfriend he\u2019s gotten pregnant, the latter dramatized by an opening-credits sequence in which we see Marty\u2019s sperm valiantly swimming their way toward her ovum, until one, by dint of sheer determination, finally reaches its goal.<\/p>\n

Chalamet has put no less effort into promoting the movie\u2019s release. At an early screening last Thursday, he said he had\u00a0128 appearances scheduled in the next 96 hours<\/a>, and while we\u2019re unlikely to get a thorough fact-check on those figures, it\u2019s certainly felt like he\u2019s been everywhere, dominating new media and old. The result of the film\u2019s early release, limited to just six screens in New York and Los Angeles, was an impressive $875,000 opening weekend\u2014the highest take per screen of any movie in 2025, and the highest for any platform release since 2016\u2019s\u00a0La La Land.<\/p>\n

The latter stat underlines some of the pitfalls involved. A big swing by a well-liked indie director with two irresistible young leads, Damien Chazelle\u2019s movie was a career-making hit, but it also became a victim of its own success, so instantly ubiquitous that people were proclaiming they were sick of it before it had even reached its peak audience. The same thing threatens\u00a0Marty\u00a0Supreme. Chalamet is a proven box-office draw\u2014his last three leading roles, in\u00a0A Complete Unknown,\u00a0Wonka, and\u00a0Dune: Part Two<\/a>, have grossed a combined $1.5 billion worldwide\u2014but with no preexisting IP or built-in fan base,\u00a0Marty\u00a0rests on his shoulders more squarely than any of its predecessors, especially since cutting through the cultural noise and getting audiences to see a movie in theaters\u00a0grows exponentially more difficult<\/a>\u00a0with every passing year. Chalamet has to be everywhere, all the time, but in a way where each appearance feels like a pleasant surprise rather than the latest stop on a promotional death march.<\/p>\n

Thus: the Zoom. Six weeks before\u00a0Marty Supreme\u2019s release, A24\u2019s social media channels surfaced what purported to be an\u00a0unedited video conference<\/a>\u00a0between Chalamet and the indie distributor\u2019s marketing department. Over the course of 18 excruciating minutes, Chalamet, his scrawny arms protruding from an incandescent yellow tank top, unveils his plans for selling the movie to a captive audience of increasingly uneasy branding specialists. At one point, he sets them up for what he seems to feel is a stunning reveal, then unveils a tiny square of solid orange, hastily magnifying it on his shared desktop when it fails to get the desired response. Then he suggests painting the Statue of Liberty the same color.<\/p>\n

Chalamet\u2019s tongue-in-cheek brain wave is a riff on a scene where Marty pitches a friend\u2019s father on the idea of investing in bright orange ping-pong balls branded with his name, despite the fact that he\u2019s at best a moderately well-known figure in a largely obscure sport. He\u2019s not the kind of person you build a campaign for a new product around, any more than\u00a0Marty Supreme\u00a0is the kind of movie you hire a blimp to promote. But the movie\u2019s campaign brilliantly harnesses the ramshackle largesse of its protagonist, with stunts, like driving a truck full of orange ping-pong balls around Manhattan, that feel both overblown and undercooked.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Dana Stevens
\n Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet\u2019s New Movie Is Part of a Trend I Can\u2019t Stand
\n Read More\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Marty\u2019s campaign has also fostered more conventional means of hype building, like releasing a $250 branded track jacket available only at pop-up stores. And, since Chalamet is campaigning for an Oscar as well as an opening weekend, some of his appearances have taken a less ironically self-aggrandizing turn. He told one interviewer that Marty Mauser was the latest in a string of \u201ctop-of-the-line performances\u201d and said that neither he nor audiences should take his prodigious talent for granted: \u201cThis is some top-level shit.<\/a>\u201d One of the Zoom sketch\u2019s best gags is when Chalamet shares his laptop screen and reveals that his desktop image is a photo of himself onstage at the Screen Actors Guild awards, accepting Best Actor with a well-received speech in which he proclaimed his desire to be \u201cone of the greats.\u201d But it\u2019s clear that desire is sincere\u2014and that Chalamet, though he holds back from saying it outright, thinks he already belongs in that pantheon.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet\u2019s New Movie Is Part of a Trend I Can\u2019t Stand
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet Is Great in Marty Supreme. But His Greatest Performance May Be What He\u2019s Doing Outside It.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

A Variety article called the movie\u2019s press tour \u201cdivisive<\/a>,\u201d and the \u201ctop-level shit\u201d interview\u2014which had started to inspire online grumblings about arrogance\u2014was taken off of the internet, a sign that, even though Chalamet\u2019s boasts are, as he told one journalist, \u201cin the spirit of Marty<\/a>,\u201d that spirit doesn\u2019t always translate outside the context of the film. It\u2019s one thing coming from a scrappy youngster struggling against the prejudice of the 1950s, and another from the Oscar-nominated millionaire who\u2019s dating Kylie Jenner. Of course, Chalamet isn\u2019t the only star who thinks of himself so highly, but an unspoken rule of Hollywood is that you\u2019re supposed to leave touting your accomplishments to others, not act like you\u2019re overdue for the industry\u2019s highest honor at the age of 29.\u00a0Chalamet is great in\u00a0Marty Supreme, but his greatest performance might be as a gifted, hard-grinding young actor whose ambition is tempered by humility\u2014at least, when he remembers that\u2019s the role that he\u2019s supposed to be playing.<\/p>\n

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I can\u2019t remember the precise moment, but somewhere between\u00a0Marty Supreme\u2019s ecstatic surprise premiere at the New York Film…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[236,88,206,57990],"class_list":{"0":"post-366793","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-the-oscars"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}