Marty Supreme Unveiled: How Marty Reisman Really Died — And Timothée Chalamet's Portrait of a Legend

Timothee Chalamet is spending Christmas not in Arrakis or a peach orchard, but at a ping-pong table. A24’s Marty Supreme is a 1950s table tennis saga with grit, swagger, and more feelings than you’d expect from a sport most people only think about in basements. The trailer has already taken off online, helped by Chalamet’s full-send transformation and a cast that is borderline chaotic in a fun way. Naturally, everyone’s asking: is Marty Mauser a real guy?

Marty Supreme: the quick stats

• Title: Marty Supreme
• Studio: A24
• Director: Josh Safdie
• Cast: Timothee Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Fran Drescher, Kevin O'Leary (yes, that Kevin O'Leary), Odessa A'zion, Tyler the Creator, Abel Ferrara
• Runtime: 2h 29m
• Release date: December 25, 2025
• IMDb score: currently listed as 7.7/10

So, who is Marty Mauser supposed to be?

Short answer: he isn’t a real person. Long answer: Josh Safdie based the film’s spirit and attitude on Marty Reisman, the flamboyant, razor-witted table tennis star who lit up the 1940s and 50s. Safdie told THR he wasn’t doing a strict biopic, more of a what-if story that treats ping-pong with main-event energy from the inside out.

"My goal was to make it as large as I possibly could. I wanted to honor Marty Mauser’s dream to make it the greatest sport in the world. I like imagining an alternative path of history where the sport did become as big as tennis — and I had to act that way because I was making it from Marty’s point of view."

That’s why the movie is loaded with real period details and table tennis lore, but isn’t tied to Reisman’s actual life. Safdie calls it an homage, not a reenactment.

The real Marty: a hustler, a champion, a character

Reisman’s origin story is already movie-worthy. As a teenager, he hustled games in backrooms and clubs for cash. At 15, he famously bet $500 on himself at a national tournament in Detroit against a guy he figured was a bookie. Plot twist: the man turned out to be the future head of the United States Table Tennis Association. After that little wake-up call, Reisman went legit and started competing seriously.

He grabbed a bronze at the 1948 World Table Tennis Championships, then picked up three more medals in 1949. He kept playing for decades and, in 1997, became the oldest person to win a national racket sport competition at age 67. He retired in 2002 but stayed in the mix as president of Table Tennis Nation. Reisman died in December 2012 at 82 from complications related to heart and lung issues. In other words: the guy lived exactly the kind of big, cheeky, stubbornly devoted life a movie like this wants to channel.

What the film is actually doing

Marty Supreme follows Marty Mauser in the 1950s as he chases a professional table tennis dream everybody around him thinks is a joke. Rather than quit, he tries to drag the sport into respectability by force of will. It’s scrappy, it’s a little romantic about obsession, and it treats ping-pong like a world-beater because that’s how Marty sees it. If the trailer is any indication, Safdie leans into the hype without winking.

Chalamet, locked in

Chalamet has been on a run of shapeshifting gigs: messiah-in-progress in Dune: Part II, then Bob Dylan in the upcoming A Complete Unknown. Marty Supreme looks like a return to the livewire energy that made people latch onto him in Call Me by Your Name and Little Women, just pointed at a paddle this time. Cinematographer Darius Khondji said Chalamet trained like a real pro when cameras started rolling, which tracks with how serious the footage looks.

That cast, though

This thing is stacked in a way that makes you pause the trailer to make sure you saw what you think you saw: Gwyneth Paltrow, Fran Drescher, Kevin O'Leary, Odessa A'zion, Tyler the Creator, and Abel Ferrara alongside Chalamet. It’s a wild roster, but it fits the film’s big-swing vibe.

Marty Supreme opens December 25, 2025. Expect lots of spin, some sweat, and a surprisingly emotional argument for taking table tennis seriously.