Timothée Chalamet plays table tennis extremely well in ‚Marty Supreme.‘ How much of it is because of practice, dedication and skill? Did CGI play a role?
First clue that someone is serious about pingpong: They call it table tennis.
Second clue: They bring their own paddle.
Timothée Chalamet dropped a third clue on movie sets all over the globe. To prepare for his role in the delightfully frenetic “Marty Supreme,” the two-time Oscar nominee traveled for years with a table in tow, training and presumably enjoying the sport at the center of the current holiday season hit.
Director Josh Safdie enlisted the husband-and-wife table-tennis teaching tandem of Diego Schaaf and Wei Wang — a former U.S. Olympian — to elevate Chalamet’s game as well as serve as technical advisors on set.
But Chalamet was already playing nearly well enough to emulate a world champion on screen. He’d taken lessons and done his homework — setting up a table in the living room of his New York apartment and playing throughout the pandemic.
“Everything I was working on, it was this secret,” Chalamet told the Hollywood Reporter. “I had a table in London while I was making ‘Wonka.’ On ‘Dune: Part Two,’ I had a table in Budapest [and] Jordan. I had a table in Abu Dhabi. I had a table at the Cannes Film Festival for ‘The French Dispatch.’”
It seems implausible that Chalamet was immersed in table tennis while also learning to sing and play guitar for the role of Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown.
