Marty Supreme is for the dreamers.
Josh Safdie’s exhilaratingly brilliant opus stars Timothée Chalamet as the indomitable Marty Mauser, a young table tennis virtuoso who chases greatness with a no-holds-barred vigor that should ring familiar to anyone who’s ever dared to dream big.
Timothée was born for this role. Like Marty, he dreams big, and he’s joined by a roster of fellow hell-bent big dreamers in Safdie’s solo Uncut Gems follow-up. Standing tall among them—marking, it should be noted, his feature film acting debut—is Tyler, The Creator.
A dreamer in every sense of the word, Tyler plays Marty’s friend Wally, another purveyor of New York’s table-tennis underworld. The stakes are high, but the artistry is higher, with several of the five-star film’s standout moments making good on the natural chemistry between Tyler and Timothée.
Tyler first met Safdie after a show back in 2017, but it would take another six years before the filmmaker delivered his and Ronald Bronstein’s script for what would later become Marty Supreme. There was no audition, no hand-wringing, no back-and-forth—Tyler was on board immediately, bringing his proven capacity for contagious joy to a character that, not unlike Marty, seemed tailor-made for his unique sensibilities.
“Tyler, when you meet him, he is joy personified,” casting director Jennifer Venditti, whose past credits include Euphoria and Uncut Gems, tells Complex over Zoom mere days after Marty Supreme bagged multiple nominations at the 2026 Golden Globes.
Marty Supreme is a lot of things. For one, it’s my favorite film of the year. It’s also a celebration of the life of a dreamer, doubling as a memorial, of sorts, for all the things we put on pause along the way.
The film hits theaters on Christmas Day, complete with (and this is not an exaggeration) roughly 150 speaking parts. In the meantime, see more of my conversation with Marty Supreme casting director Jennifer Venditti below.
This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.
What are you proudest of with Marty Supreme?
Oh, my God. No one's asked me that. Oh, God. I'm proudest of being able to work in a way that's so creative and so free. This is a combination of all my favorite things. I don't know if you know my [history], but I started street scouting like 25 years ago.
It's not this thing that you can just do with everyone. If a director doesn't know how to work with people that don't have experience, it can go really bad. Josh would just show me these locations. Basically, I say the locations were characters. Josh loves humans and characters as much as I do.
That speaks to my next question, which is the sheer scale of this thing. I felt like there were maybe 200 speaking roles?
It's about 150, yeah.
Did that present unique challenges in terms of, like, how am I going to find these people?
Yeah, and this is to A24's credit, I feel like, and I've worked with them a lot before, they really respect my process.
I said to them, 'This is what I'm gonna need. I'm gonna need a bigger team and this is what I'm gonna need.' … I had an improv actor that was with us every day. Because a lot of times in casting, the casting director just reads the sides to someone. It's like, no, that's not going to work. We need to get them embodied, we need to have someone.
So I had a young actor that was really great at improv that was in the room and we'd bring people in and just play, you know. We'd give them a scenario that was similar to the energy in the movie, and then we would get in a room and just [figure out] who can just riff, you know, and who is comfortable being filmed and being in this.
So having that, having my scouts, having my assistant and my associates and like really breaking it down, it still felt overwhelming, but I had the support that I needed. Because, you know, a lot of other places would be like, 'No, this is, you make a movie, you just have an assistant and associate. Just do it.' But [A24], they understand that this type of casting, it's different. It's not just like, you know, calling in self-tapes.
Had you done the improv thing in the past?
Yeah.
That's kind of your thing.
Yeah. We do that. I start with interviews. I always say this: we're not just casting non -actors to just be cool or do something different. It serves a purpose. I come from documentaries originally, and my love is the mixing of real life with nonfiction and fiction. Josh loves that as well. So we're looking, we're approaching every project, like it is a documentary in a way of like, ooh, is there someone's life experience that can lend to this character more than just the written word on the page? So, like, Kevin O'Leary would be an example of that.
He's so good in this too.
And he plays a modern version of that in Shark Tank. ... We're looking for people. So I first interview people, and that's a big [thing]. It's like, how does someone tell a story? What stories that they tell, is there anything that's in there that would inform this person? Because we're not looking for people to be shapeshifters. We're looking for people to bring themselves into a heightened reality.
What's an example of a question you might ask someone in that situation?
It's different all the time, but we'll start with this. We ask people, like, what their dream was, like, the dream for their life was one thing. Another thing, just to see someone tell a story, [I'll ask] 'Describe the last great day you had,' or, 'What's something that happened to you?' or 'When was your last memorable dream?'
And then, you'll just see someone's subconscious, what's happening in there.
Among the familiar faces in this is Tyler, The Creator. How involved were you with that casting? I know Josh had known him for some time. Was he just brought in automatically?
They had met, and I remember back then, I mean, first of all, Josh is really into faces. And I mean, Tyler is just, like, it's timeless. He's perfect for this era. So he knew [when] he was writing it, it wasn't done yet [but] he said, 'I'm gonna write a role for you.' There was an inspiration from another story of a character, and he just wrote him with him in mind.
In that scene, you know, when they're in the car, I feel like Tyler, when you meet him, he is joy personified. And that scene, it's like, that is him. I mean, that's what you feel like when you're around him.
That's my favorite scene in the movie.
Me too. I just couldn't wait to see that done when I read it in the [script]. I just saw him the other day at the premiere. The guy is pure joy. And that scene captures that in this way. I think he's just magical. And I want to see what else [he does next]. He was saying the other day, he's like, 'Give me a, find me a role as a villain.' He's trying to manifest that.
That'll probably work!
I know! He's such a manifester. I saw his last tour, and you just see the way he dresses, the way he presents himself, the way he's not just a performer. He's like a shapeshifter.
He's a powerhouse, and I'm sure there's going to be many more. I think he's an artist, and it says a lot about Josh that he chose this as his first role. Like, I think for someone like Tyler, who's such a creator on so many levels, for him to just be a cog in someone else's wheel in a sort of a way, he has to really respect them.
As you can see, Josh is like a master and a creative genius. And I think it was probably so fun for him to be around that. And then, him and Timothée, they both have so much charisma that you don't really have to worry about chemistry with two people like that.
You'd have to be a dead person to not have charisma with either of them. .. It's like, Timothée's the hustler and I think Tyler's character, Wally, he’s settled down. He’s trying to do the right thing. He has that in him. He maybe had it in him at one point but he’s like, you know he says it in the movie, he’s got responsibilities. He’s trying to reform himself in this sense, and Marty's trying to pull him back in.
With this being a period piece, I appreciated the attention to detail. I was fully immersed and there was no loss of that immersion. What can you tell us about those challenges?
Well, we were obsessed. Like at one point, I found one woman, like when Rachel [played by Odessa A'zion] opens the door, you know, after she tells Ira [played by Emory Cohen] the baby's not his and she opens the door and then Fran [Drescher, playing Marty's mother Rebecca] and the women are there. One of the older ladies had, I think, like, eyebrow tattoos. And I was like, 'Oh' because I loved her face. … And I'm like, how are we going to do it?
Same with haircuts. Josh didn't want to use a lot of wigs and things. And it was like, okay, can this person's hair be changed naturally to the 50s? Like, what in their face is going to be a tell? We were very attuned to that.
Marty Supreme—also starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A'zion, Kevin O’Leary, Fran Drescher, Abel Ferrara, and many more—is in theaters nationwide on Christmas Day.