What compelled you to tell this story about an ambitious table tennis player from New York in the early 1950s?<\/em> Table tennis, also known as ping pong, was invented in England and London hosted the first World Tennis Championship in 1926, it\u2019s popular in Europe and Asia, it became an Olympic sport in 1988. How did you research how it was viewed in the United States in the 1950s?<\/em> Marty Supreme (c) A24<\/p><\/div>\n The main competitor for Marty in the film is a Japanese champion named Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi<\/a>, real-life Japanese Deaf Table Tennis champion), who is able to focus on the game better because he\u2019s deaf and plays with a different paddle.<\/em> What did you discover was the most significant difference between the American and Japanese mindset in the early 50s after the war?<\/em> Josh Sadfe, Timothee Chalamet (c) A24<\/p><\/div>\n Marty does not behave morally. He lies, cheats, steals, even kills to reach his goal of being able to afford to participate in table tennis tournaments in the UK and Tokyo.<\/em> Are you as obsessive as a writer-director as Marty is as a ping pong player?<\/em> You co-wrote and co-directed movies with your younger brother Benny<\/a>, like Uncut Gems (2019). Benny wrote and directed The Smashing Machine this year and you directed Marty Supreme with only Ronald Bronstein<\/a> as co-writer. What caused you to go your separate ways?<\/em> TIMOTHEE CHALAMET<\/strong><\/p>\n The director said that he offered you the title role in Marty Supreme weeks before Call Me by Your Name by Luca Guadagnino<\/a> made you famous in 2017 at the age of 21. Did you recognize yourself in this ambitious young man?<\/em> Timothee Chalamet (c) Jose Perez-A24<\/p><\/div>\n How differently do you see your career now, compared to when you first started being recognized in 2017?<\/em> You have been training for seven years to learn to play table tennis, so you would be credible as a champion of the sport. What did that teach you?<\/em> Timothee Chalamet (c) A24<\/p><\/div>\n Now that you\u2019re so famous and teenage fans go crazy for you, how do you keep focused on your work and avoid distractions?<\/em> As a role model that many young people look up to, what would you like to communicate to your audience of fans about the state of world today?<\/em> These interviews were published in Italian in Best Movie January 2026 issue<\/p>\n Interviews by Elisa Leonelli Marty Supreme, directed by Josh Safdie, stars Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a young ping pong player from New York who competes in a UK championship in 1952 and loses to a deaf Japanese player, then … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/village.elisaleonelli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Poster.jpg?resize=1%2C1\")
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JOSH SAFDIE<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nI loved table tennis as a kid, because my father (Alberto) played it throughout Europe, and my uncle Johnny actually played it at the legendary Lawrence Table Tennis Club in New York that you see in the film. Then one afternoon my wife Sara was sifting through a dollar bin of books at a thrift store when she found a book written by a New York Jewish table tennis prodigy named Marty Reisman<\/a>, The Money Player, The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Player and Hustler,<\/em> published in 1974. But our film is only loosely based on his story, so we changed the name to Marty Mauser. Those who excelled at table tennis were often people who didn\u2019t fit anywhere else. The game wasn\u2019t respected, so naturally it attracted weirdos, purists, obsessives. When I read that the sport was filling stadiums in the UK and throughout Europe, I realized that it was entirely plausible for a kid in 1952 to actually believe he could parlay the game into a life of fame and glory.<\/p>\n
\nI had to think about how the sport had evolved from this moment in the early 50s, when it was on the precipice of maybe becoming a mainstream sport, at least in Marty’s dreams. So I ended up hanging out with a lot of contemporary players of the sport, and realized that table tennis has become even more marginalized, so the dreamers inside that world have become even more intense because they’ve been forced to compensate for the fact that people think that their dream is silly, so they have to double down on it an they’re become hardened. I was hanging out with one person in particular named Adam Bobrow, who actually has a great YouTube channel, and he has a very idiosyncratic way of looking at the world. The consultants on the film were Diego Schaaf and his wife, Wei Wang, who is an Olympian of their China national team.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/village.elisaleonelli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Marty-Supreme-Tokyo.jpg?resize=640%2C364\")
\nThe Japanese did actually invent the sponge paddle, that arrived on the scene in 1952 and changed the sport. It was the first moment the country came out of isolation and did it through a sport like table tennis, which gave them a source of national pride. So we had to show the difference of the two types of players, Marty, who is the birth of modernity, the American mentality, then the Japanese mindset, the Endo character, who has a very slight independent flair. It’s fascinating, because Endo, it says in the newsreel that he has 84,000 people behind him, while you can only think of one person who’s behind Marty. So you have a people who are bonded together by a massive moment in time, the Pacific War of World War II. And all of a sudden they see this newfound hero, this American who shows up and is the epitome of that. And it’s a complicated feeling at the end, because they’re seeing this kind of American exceptionalism and hyper-individualism.<\/p>\n
\nWhen I first discovered this world, these young guys, misfits from the silent generation, the people who were too young to fight in World War II, I was fascinated by their point of view on victory and what it meant to be American in that moment. Is Marty patriotic? He has his own sense of pride, he’s definitely prideful of being American. The American dream became spotlit after the war, you saw the birth of what ended up becoming corporate colonialism. And what was happening in Japan in particular is fascinating. The way they embraced defeat, there’s no example like it in the course of time, and I don’t think there ever will be, because they went from so high to so low overnight. Oddly America rewrote the Constitution in Japan after the war, when they were occupying that country, and what ended up happening is that we introduced the American dream. You have a washer and dryer, you have material objects. This was a turning point in history, when capitalism started to prevail in a war with socialism and communism, so it was the beginning of the real victory toward capitalism. The American dream is such a powerful story, and after the war dreaming big became an international sensation alongside this new idea that individuals make history and play a crucial role in shaping and reshaping the world. Marty represents the confidence, cockiness, and ambition that America expressed in the postwar years.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/village.elisaleonelli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Josh-Sadfe-Timothee-Chalamet.jpg?resize=640%2C800\")
\n“Absolutely. But morality, the objective idea of morals, is subjective to each person, it\u2019s in relation to your life in the moment and what matters to you. And Marty\u2019s dream requires a certain level of laser focus and blinders because it\u2019s so intense. And because it\u2019s a dream that no one respects, it intensifies his belief and makes it hard on him, it insulates him. And those blinders lead him into situations where he’s not thinking about other people. But at the end of the day, he is somebody who is chasing happiness and he is inspiring other people through his own sheer ambition intensity, fire and passion. And that inspiration overcompensates, overturns any sort of moral question that you might have. Marty is the quintessential dreamer, he\u2019s the ultimate romantic and the most relentless optimist. It\u2019s a coming-of-age story, which explores how in youth an uncompromising individuality can be both freeing and restricting. For Marty, his blind faith in his dream leads him in an indirect way to true self-discovery, to real change. Marty\u2019s commitment to his dream relies on self-belief, but in the end it\u2019s the belief from others that proves to be the most important.”<\/p>\n
\nObsessiveness comes from determination and from an insulation where you have a very specific goal in front of you, so you pursue perfection, wanting to be the supreme version of yourself, the best player. You have to obsess over every detail, you have to have that intensity, because if you don’t believe it, no one else will. And this movie is very much about your own belief in that dream and seeing it through, the obsession of following that dream and commanding it.<\/p>\n
\nYou spend so many years working next to somebody, then you both decide you want to do something different. He wanted to explore one thing, I wanted to explore another. So, of course, it was emotionally different for me, but this film was so gargantuan and ambitious that I never really had the luxury of stopping and thinking about how directing this time was different from my first film in 2008, The Pleasure of Being Robbed<\/em>. But it is nice to be able to watch my brother’s film and see how he was expressing himself.<\/p>\n
\n“As far as my resemblance to Marty, he is me the way I was before I had a career. And I say that delicately, because he’s not the most admirable character, he is very motivated to achieve his goals, but what I probably related to the most was this fierce determination and drive to get to where he wanted in his career, as I did, not taking no for an answer, especially in the film industry where there’s so much rejection when you come out the gate, and really the only person believing in yourself at the jump is you. Marty is an ambitious young man who wants to be recognized as the greatest table tennis player in the world. And while he may actually be the greatest in the world, by way of his circumstances and the place he finds himself in life, he also happens to be a scrappy young adult on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the dawn of the 1950s, when the story opens.”<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/village.elisaleonelli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Timothee-Chalamet-2.jpg?resize=640%2C527\")
\n“From 22 to 26-years-old, that is to say when my career really took off, I felt like the rug got pulled out from under me. In many ways I’m very proud of Call Me By Your Name<\/em> and Beautiful Boy<\/em>, these movies I did up top, and when I did those early movies, no one wanted anything from you, there were no distractions from the outside world. So at a distance, sometimes I get nostalgic about my early to my mid 20s at this point, but I’m happy about where I’m at now. Back then I romanticized the tortured artists, like Kid Cudi, Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix; in past tense those were my heroes, and in present tense Joaquin is still my hero. But I also want to be content in my own life, and with the confidence I got from completing my work on A Complete Unknown<\/em><\/a> and Marty Supreme<\/em>. In the process of getting to your late-20s, you generally become less selfish as a human being, you\u2019re trying to figure out your personality less, because you know who you are, you unbecome the center of your universe, which is only natural, in fact it’s healthy. So I never thought that I’m going backwards and to become this guy, Marty, because I’m past that moment in my life, but what\u2019s so cool about playing an athlete is that it allowed me to bring an athletic mentality to this kind of movie, boxing out all distractions, realizing that the gift of my life is to work as an actor at the highest level. I got two months in my life to be Bob Dylan, two months to be Marty Mouser, I just finished playing Paul Atreides in Dune Part 3<\/em> in Abu Dhabi. And I’ll never get to be those characters again. So why not give it my all, and I’ll rest when I’m dead, or whatever that quote is.”<\/p>\n
\n“As far as the ping-pong sequences, I worked with coordinators Diego Schaaf and his wife Wei Wang, for about four or five years in between different projects. And the three months leading up to the shooting, it was about learning these sequences, almost like choreography, because it’s this strange, arrhythmic balletic dance that is memorized in advance, and at some point we got into a great rhythm about it. And I was well propped up basically by all the professional table tennis players that you see in the movie, like this fantastic player, Timo Boll, one of the great living table tennis players from Germany, an Olympian. It feels strange to say this, but Ronnie Bronstein, our writer, said that table tennis is a great visual metaphor in the movie because it’s such a humiliating sport, ping pong is a silly word and the sport looks silly. And I almost felt defensive about my character, Marty, because to him it’s the greatest dream in the world, and that to me was like a transmutation of acting. And I feel increasingly in my career that I don’t want to shy away from that, because I want other actors to feel as comfortable to also say that they’re in pursuit of greatness the way Marty Mauser was, and simply put, with all humility, I feel I am too, because this lifestyle and the demands that come with it are too bizarre to do anything but want to be the best. I feel like that attitude in show business lifts everyone, because it encourages everyone to do their best, no matter how pedantic or cliche that sounds. And Hollywood’s not an institution, it\u2019s not an undying thing, so there needs to be vitality in movies. That’s why I’m so proud to be in a Josh Safdie movie. This isn’t a formula, this script doesn’t take on an act one, act two, act three structure. So these are the kinds of movies that bring life to show business, and I want to be a part of that.”<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/village.elisaleonelli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Timothee-Chalamet.jpg?resize=640%2C374\")
\n“I do that by literally just blocking it out, you just have to not look at it, so when I work, I keep my phone off, because it decreases your level of focus. And I don’t think it’s symptomatic of having a movie career either, I\u2019m sure you also see it in your own work as journalists. To me, there’s an energy and culture that’s way different than when I was an adolescent, like the hip-hop I listened to in 2010 or whatever, it was all aspirational, it was all shamelessly about getting to the top. And for me as a youth, it was very inspiring. But now, because there’s such a malaise in culture and a resentment of what is, rightfully or wrongfully based on your opinion, perceived as elitist institutions, Hollywood included, everyone is a little on edge and guilty and freaked out all the time. When I think about 16-year-old me, and now I’m doing a press conference with the Hollywood Foreign Press at 29-years-old, when I’ve been lucky enough to be nominated for the Golden Globes before, and I’m with a movie now that I’m hoping to get out there, this all feels like a dream. I’m living in a simulation, like in a positive Truman Show<\/em>, that isn’t bleak. I know I’m still young, but the great thing about approaching 30 is that you start to feel less paranoid about it, because your life is your life. In that way I’m like Marty, where my heart is on my sleeve, and any attempt to disguise that or be too cool for school is challenging for me, because I don’t want to look back on life and career and realize that I pretended to care less about this than I did.”<\/p>\n
\n“If I were to answer that totally honestly, I am primarily inspired by playing Bob Dylan<\/a>, who refused to be a moral compass, so to people who are concerned about my fashion choices or my political angle, I say that 100% of my pursuit is to be artistic in my life. That\u2019s the actual gift that I have in front of me, and to pretend to be anything other than that would be so strange, to have a career in Hollywood then to claim that I want to be an ethical example for everyone. Now I don’t want to be the opposite either, but that’s really my thought in that regard, most simply my gift is to be an actor or an artist, and to think anything higher of myself would be strange, because I don\u2019t want to be a thought leader, I don’t have the credentials. I increasingly want to focus on making great movies, keep my head down, focus on the work and talk to you about it, which is not a dangerous path. As far as younger generations today, especially those who grew up under COVID, and spent their high school on zoom, it\u2019s like the Sex Pistols after the Beatles; they both made great music, but their attitude is more punk, \u201cfuck you, we have our own thing,\u201d and it\u2019s their right. But I would hope that they could see this movie, Marty Supreme<\/em>, and realize that ambition is not a bad thing, that you can care about your dream and be shameless in pursuing it.”<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/village.elisaleonelli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/BM-Marty-0c.jpg?resize=640%2C797\")
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