Timothée Chalamet Tackles Table Tennis in the ‘Marty Supreme’ Trailer. Here’s Everything We Know
In Marty Supreme, Timothée Chalamet finally plays a superstar athlete—specifically, a gifted 1950s ping-pong player.
It sounds like a joke, but I think ping-pong might be the perfect pastime for Chalamet’s slight, sly sharpness. He hasn’t necessarily got the brute size for any of those nastier, rougher sports, but ping-pong? Skillful, intelligent, quick and crafty ping-pong? I think he could be onto a winner there.
So it makes a fair bit of sense that he’ll be playing a ping-pong pro in A24’s Marty Supreme, which we saw our first glimpse of courtesy of some leaked pics of Chalamet on set back in fall 2024. And now, we finally have a trailer:
There’s a fair bit of hype about this one, on account of some rather sizeable names involved in the project. But who are they? What are they doing there? And who is this mysterious Marty Supreme I speak of? Fret not. I will tell you right now.
What is Marty Supreme?
Marty Supreme is a sports drama film from indie powerhouse A24, loosely based on the life of legendary American ping-pong pro Marty Reisman—Chalamet’s character is named Marty Mauser—but with some fiction stirred into the mix to spice things up a little.
Who’s in it?
Aside from Chalamet, we’ve got a stacked and intriguing cast, including everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow (in her first non-Marvel movie role since Mortdecai a decade ago) to Fran Drescher to Tyler, The Creator—the latter making his first appearance in any feature film ever. Director Abel Ferrara (King of New York, Bad Lieutenant), Odessa A’zion (Hellraiser), and Penn Jillette (the taller, more verbal half of famed magical duo Penn & Teller) are in this one, too.
We don’t know much about who’s playing who—but in her recent Vanity Fair cover story, Paltrow revealed that she’s playing the wife of someone in the “ping-pong Mafia” who “becomes entangled” with Chalamet’s Marty. Paltrow and Chalamet were photographed shooting a makeout scene in New York City last October, and Paltrow told VF that’s only the beginning: “I mean, we have a lot of sex in this movie,” she said. “There’s a lot—a lot.”
Vulnerable positions, her interlocutor asks? “Beyond,” Paltrow responds, before elaborating on the more emotional side of the two characters’ torrid pong-fling: “They meet and she’s had a pretty tough life, and I think he breathes life back into her, but it’s kind of transactional for them both.”
Who’s directing Marty Supreme?
The film is being directed by Josh Safdie, who cowrote the script with longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein, and is either the Penn or the Teller of the Safdie brothers along with his brother and until-recently directorial partner Benny, depending on the order you choose to place them in in your head. The pair directed sparkly stressfest Uncut Gems with Adam Sandler, as well as the gnarly crime odyssey Good Time with Robert Pattinson.
Who was Marty Reisman?
Marty Reisman was the 1958 and 1960 US singles men’s ping-pong champion. Unsure what went wrong in 1959, but one imagines the film might tell us. The guy was kind of a character—he also won the 1997 US national hardbat (an old-school kind of ping-pong) championships at the age of 67, becoming the oldest player ever to win an open US-wide racket sport competition at the time. For more details of Reisman’s life, you could track down his 1974 autobiography, The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler—but come on, you don’t wanna go and get yourself spoiled, do you?
When will the film come out?
Marty Supreme hits theaters on December 25, 2025.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
