You might recall that Timothée Chalamet spent much of his A Complete Unknown Oscar campaign last year sporting the wispy mustache of every pre-adolescent boy’s dream. That pencil sketch of facial hair was for his starring role in Josh Safdie’s solo-directorial debut, the ping pong epic Marty Supreme. The movie is already getting rave reviews after its first screening this week; I’d especially like to shout out IndieWire’s chief film critic David Ehrlich for this gem he posted after seeing the film: “Marty Supreme aka One Paddle After Another.” (That’s how you become chief, people!) Anyway, Marty: The Little Mustache That Could comes out on Christmas Day, so The Hollywood Reporter has a plumb new profile of Timmy and Safdie. The two met just before Timmy’s fame blew up in 2017 from Call Me By Your Name, and they’ve been preparing for this movie pretty much ever since. Timmy went into detail on the years of ping pong training leading up to this moment:

In 2018, Chalamet started taking ping-pong lessons at a 24-hour facility in Lower Manhattan. During COVID, he got rid of his living-room furniture at his Tribeca home and replaced it with a full table-tennis setup. Safdie came by one day to assess his skill level — again, four years out from actually making the movie — and as they played, wound up hurting himself. “In my apartment that wasn’t made for table-tennis, he fully sprained his ankle and was limping around for three months,” Chalamet says.

After the pandemic lockdowns, Chalamet got pretty busy with other movies. This did not mean he stopped training. “Everything I was working on, it was this secret: I had a table in London while I was making Wonka. On Dune 2, I had a table in Budapest, Jordan. I had a table in Abu Dhabi. I had a table at the Cannes Film Festival for The French Dispatch. I got myself an Airbnb in a town [around] Saint-Tropez after The French Dispatch, overlooking the water, and I was taking lessons there.”

For those familiar with Chalamet’s similarly intensive years-long prep to play Dylan in A Complete Unknown, he hears you may be skeptical — and will soon put any and all doubts to rest. “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 says. “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.”

The work shows. Safdie shoots the table tennis sequences with breathtaking vigor, often capturing Chalamet dominating matches in long, single takes. Widely celebrated for his unbearably tense filmmaking, Safdie brings that immediacy to these scenes in a way that makes you wonder why more films haven’t taken advantage of table tennis’s cinematic pacing.

…But this is fundamentally Chalamet’s movie. You sense he feels this character in his bones — a New York kid of wide-eyed ambition with a vision for conquering the world, and who will stop at nothing to get there. “In spirit, this is the most who I was that I’ve had to play a role. This is who I was before I had a career,” Chalamet says. “Some people are fortunate enough to stumble into their success or be passive about their pursuit of whatever they want to do in life. That wasn’t it for me. For me, it was putting in the 10,000 hours. It was dropping out of college. It was taking a risk. It was pursuing projects that were untraditional at first — at the time, it was kind of radical, the choices I was making when I was 20.”

[From THR]

Timmy, on the eve of his 30th birthday in December, is absolutely killing me with his use of “as the kids say.” And then I felt doubly old because no cap, I’d never heard “cap” used as slang and had to look it up. (Did I use it correctly, there?) A similar moment that made me chuckle in this piece was Timmy ostensibly complimenting costar Gwyneth Paltrow: “She was incredible … when I work with these people whose work I grew up on…” Lol. The thing is, Timmy is gonna have a long, illustrious career, so the wheels of time will turn and one day some little whippersnapper will be saying these words about Timothée. (Of course by then it’ll likely be an AI actor doing the praising, but that’s another story.)

To end where we began: a comment on Timmy’s hair. Last year’s movie promo cycle featured the ‘stache. It appears this year we’re in for shaved-head Timmy! He was rumored to have gotten the buzz cut back in July for filming Dune: Messiah, and the snaps of him at the Yankees game with GF Kylie Jenner this week just made it real in all its bald glory. Alls I can say is, thank goodness the lookalike contest happened last year!

Photos credit: ASPN/Backgrid, IPA/INSTARimages, screenshots from YouTube