Timothée Chalamet to play ping pong wizard, there has to be a twist

As easy as it was to use the The Who pun in this article’s headline, Timothée Chalamet’s newest project really isn’t that surprising at all. Following his Dune: Part Two co-star Zendaya’s lead, the Call Me By Your Name actor has set his sights on the high stakes world of racket sports—or paddle sports, to be more exact. Chalamet is set to star in Marty Supreme, an upcoming film about ping pong from A24 and director Josh Safdie.

According to Variety, the film “is said to be about” professional ping pong player Marty Reisman, who died in 2012. Reisman began his career at age 12 playing table tennis on Manhattan’s Lower East Side for bets and other prize money. He went on to win 22 major ping pong titles from 1946 to 2002, including five bronze medals at the World Table Tennis Championships. In 1997, he became the oldest player to win an open national competition in a racket sport at age 67 by winning the National Hardbat Championship. He was known as the “wizard of table tennis” throughout his career, and even performed a ping pong comedy routine with his partner, Douglas Cartland, as an opening act for the Harlem Globetrotters.

While Chalamet has clearly been bitten by the biopic bug with his upcoming Bob Dylan film, A Complete Unknown, it’s not clear as of this writing whether Marty Supreme will be a straight Reisman biography or something else entirely. It is Safdie behind the camera, after all, so odds are probably on the latter. This project is also notable since it marks not only Josh’s first feature since 2019's Uncut Gems, but also his first project since he and his brother, Benny, decided to go their separate ways creatively earlier this year.

It will be interesting to see what Josh can cook up on his own, but whatever it is, Chalamet is clearly a fan. “The New York directing duo have taken it upon themselves to keep alive the mantle of gritty and raucously interior inner-city films built by spiritual kin like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee,” the actor wrote of the brothers in a 2019 tribute for Variety. “The pair have continuously put out contemporary, raw and untethered work over the last decade, each film building on the traits of the prior, but never once sacrificing their innate grittiness.” How innately gritty can the world of competitive ping pong possible be? We guess we’ll find out whenever Marty Supreme hits theaters.