In Marty Supreme, Timothée Chalamet plays a true hustler. The character is one of the world’s greatest table tennis players, and he is willing to do just about anything to prove it – and that means lying, cheating, and scamming all so that he can get the opportunities he needs. It makes watching the character’s story one hell of a cinematic experience… but I love that the same level of commitment was found on the set of the movie as well, as the actor went way above and beyond shooting one extremely memorable scene.
Without giving too much away plot-wise, there is a part in the film in which Chalamet’s Marty Mauser submits to having his bare rear end spanked with a ping pong paddle in order to get transportation to an upcoming tournament, and while the production was set up with a butt double for the star and a prop spanking instrument, neither ended up being used, and what we see in Marty Supreme is in every way the real deal.
Kevin O’Leary, best known as “Mr. Wonderful” from the TV series Shark Tank, is featured as the “spanker” to Timothée Chalamet “spankee” in the aforementioned Marty Supreme scene, and he told Us Weekly the story of how plans for the moment during production changed at the last minute. First-time solo director Josh Safdie was ready to move forward shooting with his star substituted for a stand-in, but the Dune actor wouldn’t hear of it. O’Leary explained,
Timmy walked in [and] said, ‘No, it’s got to be my ass. I’m going to immortalize my ass on film in perpetuity. And he said, ‘I’m doing it.’ So we started whacking cheeks left and right and left and right to try and keep the red the same intensity.
As for the reason why the Marty Supreme scene actually has Timothée Chalamet with rosy cheeks, it’s because O’Leary was hitting him with an authentic table tennis paddle. Per Leary, there was a fake one that they tried to use that was equipped with a hinge and foam padding that would lessen the impact on the his co-star’s heinie, but it ended up breaking, and what replaced it was “a real paddle, wood, like, a real paddle, with grooves on the surface of it.”
The reality star-cum-actor recalls that over a dozen takes were shot with the paddle making authentic contact, but there was a point when the director told the pair that the impact wasn’t reading properly on camera and didn’t look real enough. O’Leary was apparently given the green light to put some muscle in it, and while the result involved his scene partner experiencing some real pain, it was exactly what the movie needed, and it’s the shot that we see in the finished film:
I wound up like a baseball bat, and I nailed his right cheek, and I think his eyeballs exploded out of his head, and that’s what you see. His reaction to that was still just great… I have a new respect for that kid. There’s no question about it. And he deserves an Academy Award.
That’s commitment!
Arriving from A24, Marty Supreme truly is one of the best movies of the year (it ranked very highly in my personal 2025 film rankings), and I have zero doubt that when the Academy Award nominations are announced next month, Timothée Chalamet will be one of the names called out in the Best Actor category. If you have any doubts yourself, that just means that you haven’t seen the film yet – and you should go about fixing that as soon as possible, as it’s now playing in theaters.
