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.”
“If anyone thinks this is cap, as the kids say — if anyone thinks this is made up — this is all documented, and it’ll be put out,” he said. “These were the two spoiled projects where I got years to work on them. This is the truth. I was working on both these things concurrently.”
Wherever Chalamet found the time, Schaaf was impressed by the result.
“He was singularly dedicated to getting this to be the same quality as the rest of the movie,” Schaaf told the Hollywood Reporter.
Eschewing a stunt double for the table tennis scenes was a point of pride for Chalamet. The only concession to modern moviemaking was that several of the longer sequences during games were choreographed without a ball, which was added later via computer-generated imagery (CGI).
“We realized it had to be scripted to be able to film it,” Schaaf told the Washington Post. “And because it was scripted, we had to practice it first with a real ball. He had to understand the physical layout of the point: Where does he have to go? When does he have to go there? When you later on do [visual effects] and put the ball in there, it’s critical that the player goes to the right place.”
Schaaf said about 60 points were scripted.
“We needed a lot of rehearsal, and I was amazed,” he said. “Timothée wound up getting a better feel for it than most professional players because professional players take the cue from the ball. You take the ball away, they all were like ‘What is the timing?’
“Of course, they have a good sense of timing and then they learned it quickly. But Timothée was right there on top of it.”
The on-screen rival of Chalamet’s character, Marty Mauser, is Koto Endo, portrayed by real-life Japanese table tennis champion Koto Kawaguchi. Their dynamic approximated the real-life rivalry between 1950s U.S. champion Marty Reisman and Japan’s Hiroji Satoh.
In her review of “Marty Supreme,” Times film critic Amy Nicholson noted that well-struck pingpong balls travel up to 70 mph.
“Set in 1952 New York, this deranged caper races after a money-grubbing table tennis hustler (he prefers ‘professional athlete’) who argues like he plays, swatting away protests and annoying his adversaries to exhaustion,” she wrote.
Nicholson offers that Reisman would be pleased by the movie, “which time-travels audiences back seven decades to when American table tennis players were certain bright days were ahead.
“As an athlete, Chalamet seems to have lost muscle for the role. Yet as funny as it is to see a guy this scrawny carry himself like Hercules, he leaps and strikes with conviction.”
Nothing gives an actor — or an athlete — self-assurance like practice, repetitions and rehearsals. Chalamet’s paddle performance is proof.
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