In the end, Marty did not reign supreme Saturday night when Timothée Chalamet and Adam Sandler lost 3-1 in a friendly game of pick-up basketball.
The event took place at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles as the two actors promoted their latest Oscar-hopeful projects. Chalamet vies for Best Actor for the second year in a row with “Marty Supreme,” while Sandler hopes to finally pick up his first Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in “Jay Kelly.” Following a discussion about their respective careers, Chalamet and Sandler, basketball fanatics both, faced off against two young audience members in a first-to-three game of pick-up.
This portion of the night went decidedly less well for the actors, who much joked about their respective ball abilities during the interview. The acting duo never led throughout the three-minute game, with each making a few failed attempts at the basket. A single successful shot from Sandler brought the game to a 1-1 tie early on, but the pair was soon bested by their (complete) unknown competitors.
“I’ve played basketball in this gym many times, and I never do good here,” Sandler said earlier in the night. “35 years I’ve been playing ball here, but I just suck in this gym.” Chalamet then recounted a time that he, too, played basketball at Fairfax as a high schooler — a night that involved him locking himself outside a gym and having to hop a fence to get back in (“It was that scary height of fence where I was like, ‘Whoa, if I fall, this could be it’”).
It’s unclear exactly when the Chalamet/Sandler kinship started in the public eye. Appropriately, the pair (30 years apart in age) was photographed playing basketball together in New York in 2023, a moment they joked about throughout the night. 2025 saw the duo at the center of viral awards season moments, as Sandler pronounced Chalamet’s last name in his iconic drawl following a Nikki Glaser set-up at the Golden Globes — and repeated the bit at the Academy Awards.
“I grew up on American media, so I know Adam Sandler well,” Chalamet started when asked how the pair knows each other.
In truth, the pair met through Jason Reitman’s “Men, Women & Children” — a film that Sandler starred in and Chalamet was ultimately cut from. Sandler quipped that Reitman did “the right thing,” before saying that the young actor’s talent was evident even in 2014.
“I remember when Jason Reitman was talking about you being in it, he said to me, ‘Oh my God, this kid playing the quarterback, he’s f—king incredible,’” Sandler recounted. “He knew right out the gate how good you were.”
Chalamet has been on the record as a Sandler admirer, championing the actor’s work in “Uncut Gems” during 2019’s Oscar season. Now, the younger actor finds himself in Sandler’s shoes, delivering his own critically acclaimed performance in a film by Josh Safdie (one half of the “Uncut Gems” directorial duo, who was present at Saturday’s event). On Saturday, Chalamet acknowledged that he had big shoes to fill as he follows Sandler up as a Josh Safdie lead. He also cited “Punch-Drunk Love” as a significant inspiration of his — particularly for his “Marty Supreme” performance.
“To actors across all ages, but really my generation, it’s one of the most important performances,” Chalamet said. “Important’s not even the right word — it’s impactful, deeply moving.”
Chalamet was a major contender in the most recent awards season, receiving broad acclaim for his performance in James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown.” Though Chalamet lost the Oscar to Adrien Brody’s “The Brutalist” turn, he won the Best Actor prize at the SAG Awards, delivering an instantly iconic speech where he declared himself as a performer “in the pursuit of greatness.”
In “Marty Supreme,” Chalamet plays a young man on a similar pursuit, a young New Yorker attempting to establish himself as a ping pong legend in a high-intensity odyssey. Chalamet said the gift of his life has been the opportunity to “focus on this acting thing the way Marty Mauser focuses on ping pong.” Sandler had high praise for Chalamet’s latest performance, a turn he repeatedly described as “fresh” from the younger talent.
“When I watched ‘Marty,’ I was like, ‘You lucky bastard!’ You went hard,” Sandler said. “Every sentence, every scene.”
Sandler, in comparison, took on a bit of a gentler role in 2025. The “Saturday Night Live” alum stars alongside George Clooney in “Jay Kelly,” a film directed by Noah Baumbach (with whom Sandler teamed for 2017’s “The Meyerowitz Stories”) about a film star who begins to realize that “all (his) memories are movies” — for better and, often, for worse. Sandler joins Jeremy Strong (“Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere”) and Ryan Bader (“The Smashing Machine”) in 2025’s cinematic catalog of kind, supportive managers, playing Jay Kelly’s ever-attentive caretaker as the pair’s relationship reaches a critical juncture.
“(Baumbach) handed me the script and told me Clooney was playing Jay Kelly, and I just got excited. It had so many scenes in it that were exciting to do,” Sandler said. “I knew (Clooney) a little bit, I mean I played basketball with him when I was younger.”
“No way, he balls?” Chalamet asked.
“He’s great,” Sandler replied.
On top of being an acclaimed comic actor, Sandler has made several dramatic turns (like his latest in “Jay Kelly) throughout his career that received sweeping praise — “Punch-Drunk Love” and “Uncut Gems” among them. None of these turns ever materialized in an Academy Award nomination. Though Chalamet noted that they don’t make art for trophies, he said he hopes Sandler’s luck changes this year.
“I hope for ‘Jay Kelly’ — they should’ve done it for ‘Uncut Gems’ — I know it’s not about the awards, blah, blah, blah, but you should have a golden man in your hands,” Chalamet said. “Because man, you are one of the best f—king actors.”
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