Timothée Chalamet talks ballet, DiCaprio and 'Marty Supreme'

• Timothée Chalamet's new movie "Marty Supreme" hits theaters on Christmas, days before the star's 30th birthday.
• He plays an ambitious ping-pong upstart named Marty Mauser, who's hot to compete in the global championships.
• The two-time Oscar nominee is widely regarded as a best-actor frontrunner for his performance.

NEW YORK – Is it really Christmas without a Timothée Chalamet movie?

The prolific leading man has released a new film nearly every December for the past seven years, including “Little Women,” “Don’t Look Up,” “Wonka,” “A Complete Unknown” and now “Marty Supreme” (in theaters nationwide Christmas Day), a white-knuckled ping-pong epic that’s lobbed him back into the Oscar race.

“I don’t know how that happened, Christmas and me,” Chalamet says, calling as he strolls through New York on a frigid afternoon. The A-lister has many fond memories of going to theaters around the holidays: walking to Times Square with his grandma to watch the Jennifer Lawrence film “Joy," or taking her to Brooklyn to see “Little Women” together.

“That’s a really wonderful memory – that ‘Little Women’ crowd was so passionate and it’s such a great Christmas movie,” Chalamet recalls. “Now that I’ve got these movies coming out around Christmas, we’ve made it a little tradition in my family to see them together. My mom’s already seen ‘Marty’ four times – that’s more than I have at this point!

“But my dad hasn’t seen it yet, so I told him, ‘Wait until we all watch it at Christmas!’”

Timothée Chalamet shares the connection between ballet and ping-pong

Set in 1950s Manhattan, “Marty Supreme” follows a fast-talking, ping-pong hotshot named Marty Mauser (Chalamet), who is dead set on jetting to Tokyo to compete in the global championships. But first, he needs to scrounge up money and get sponsors, which lands him in a series of violent, get-rich-fast schemes.

Chalamet, 29, started training in table tennis back in 2018 after meeting director and cowriter Josh Safdie (“Uncut Gems”), who developed the project for him specifically. The young actor had his Oscar-nominated breakthrough in “Call Me By Your Name” the year before, and Safdie was intrigued by his mix of coltish charm and nervy determination.

“He was Timmy Supreme,” Safdie recalls. “I was really interested in working with that energy.”

“He’s cheeky, he’s got rizz and he’s incredibly dedicated,” adds co-star Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Chalamet’s love interest, an aging actress named Kay Stone. “When you bring all those tenets together, you find somebody who’s just ready to explode.”

To prepare, Chalamet studied real-life ping-pong greats including the late Marty Reisman, who loosely inspired the movie. He also looked to more “obscure places” to find the character’s physicality.

“The more table tennis I watched, the more balletic I realized the movements were and how graceful they could be,” says Chalamet, whose sister, mom and grandmother were all ballerinas. “I grew up watching lots of ballet and I feel like I incorporated more of my family's dance background into this than I ever have on anything – even on something like ‘Wonka,’ where I'm dancing.

“It just felt like a nice mixture: to try to have the spirit of a Mike Tyson or Michael Jordan, but the physicality of a George Balanchine or Mikhail Baryshnikov.”  

He wanted to push boundaries with viral 'Marty Supreme' marketing

Last February, the “Dune” star turned heads with his best actor acceptance speech at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, where he made a bold pronouncement about his “pursuit of greatness.” It’s rare for young people to speak so unapologetically about ambition, but for a long time, Chalamet felt that he was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“It was a protective mechanism,” Chalamet says. “It’s a notoriously challenging industry, so I think early in my career, there was this feeling of, ‘I hope I get to keep working.’ By the way, that’s how I feel now, too. But at first, at my core I was going, ‘I don’t know if this is going to last.’”

He’s since learned not to deflect praise and to trust what he brings to the table. Portraying Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown,” he asked to perform all the music live rather than lip sync. And on “Marty Supreme,” he insisted on playing full games of ping-pong instead of cutting between points, to better capture the “physical exhaustion” of the sport.

“These last two, three years have been reaffirming the authorship that I had very organically at the beginning of my career, which gets chipped away at in the entertainment industry,” Chalamet says. “If you're not progressing in life, you're going backwards.”

With “Marty Supreme,” the two-time Oscar nominee felt he could “push the boundaries” of a traditional movie rollout. Chalamet has helped orchestrate Gen Z-geared stunts including orange blimps, exclusive merch drops and a surprise rap song referencing his billionaire girlfriend, Kylie Jenner. He also released an 18-minute spoof video of him pitching outlandish ideas to a befuddled marketing team.

“I'm actually a young consumer," Chalamet says. “You sit in on enough of these meetings, like the one I parodied, and you go, ‘Oh, wow, I might be on the pulse here more than anyone.’ Equally, my ideas might be totally fried and people might not be in a position to tell me how bad they are [laughs]. That’s the joke of the whole thing.”

Chalamet is feeling more 'sure-footed' than ever on the cusp of 30

This season, awards pundits predict that Chalamet will be neck and neck with Leonardo DiCaprio (“One Battle After Another”) to win the best actor Oscar. “It’s a huge honor,” Chalamet says of being in the mix with his longtime idol. “His career speaks for itself and his work in ‘One Battle’ is tremendous.”

In conversation, the actor is very conscious of how he comes across, frequently editing himself mid-sentence as he talks about the movie's themes of identity, insecurity and being wrapped up in a dream ‒ all of which he relates to "deeply."

The Hollywood dreamboat gets reflective about turning 30 later this month, and the importance of being your own advocate.

“Success and fame can mess with your head,” Chalamet says. “But if you’re in a position like I’m in – where there’s an unusual amount of eyes or attention, or positive or negative affirmation – it’s all the more reason to be really sure-footed. Anybody in their life should feel strong in their foundation and who they are.”  

Ultimately, he adds, “sometimes you’ve got to live life the way 16-year-old you would have wanted you to live.”