The Oscar winner only knew Timothée Chalamet as ‘this sort of cultural phenomenon’ before she starred with him in ‘Marty Supreme.’
Timothée Chalamet stars in first trailer for ‘Marty Supreme’
Timothée Chalamet plays a ruthless sleazeball in hot pursuit of table tennis glory in the anxious new movie “Marty Supreme.”
- Gwyneth Paltrow has her first dramatic role since 2010 in “Marty Supreme.”
- She plays a fading movie star who has an affair with a ping-pong obsessive (Timothée Chalamet).
- The movie opens in New York and LA on Friday, Dec. 19, before going nationwide on Dec. 25.
NEW YORK − Gwyneth Paltrow is back where she belongs.
In Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme” (in New York and Los Angeles Dec. 19, in theaters nationwide Christmas Day), the A-lister is both arresting and heart-rending as the fictional fading movie star Kay Stone, who feels revitalized by a passionate fling with manic ping-pong upstart Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet).
It’s Paltrow’s first dramatic role since 2010’s “Country Strong.” In the 15 years since, the Oscar winner has continued to expand her wellness and lifestyle empire Goop, making a smattering of screen appearances in TV comedies “Glee” and “The Politician,” as well as playing Pepper Potts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“I don’t think I was disillusioned,” Paltrow, 53, says, seated with Safdie in the opulent Central Park townhouse where “Marty” was filmed. “I was very focused on building my business. When I was in my 20s, I really worked myself into a burnout, and I wasn’t always strategic about the choices I was making. I just thought, ‘I have to say yes and keep going.’ ”
She briefly stepped away from acting in the early 2000s when she had her children Apple, 21, and Moses, 19, with ex-husband Chris Martin. And when she did return to Hollywood, she typically made only one film a year after launching Goop in 2008.
“I kept leaning out, and I think part of it was to contemplate if I really wanted to do it, or if it was something I had just thought I wanted to do,” Paltrow says. “I had to do a lot of reckoning. If I wanted to go back, what circumstances would it be under?”
For a while, she didn’t really look at scripts that were sent her way: “Once in a while, some things would get through and I would just say no.”
But when “Marty” came along, “I was in a period when my children were leaving home, so I was in an empty nest, really reevaluating, ‘What is my purpose? Who am I?’ ” Paltrow recalls. “I felt like I was thrown in a tumble dryer; I really lost orientation. At the same time, my brother [director Jake Paltrow] told me about Josh Safdie. I didn’t know who he was; I was so embarrassingly out of the loop.”
Safdie is best known for his nerve-shredding thrillers with Adam Sandler (“Uncut Gems”) and Robert Pattinson (“Good Time”). As he tells it, “there was no entertaining even of a conversation [with Paltrow] for the first couple of years. I couldn’t send a script; I couldn’t get a meeting because you really were just not doing it.”
But Safdie, 41, knew that he needed Paltrow to play Kay, whom he envisioned as an amalgam of Old Hollywood stars Grace Kelly and Ruby Keeler. As a teen, he remembers watching Paltrow in movies such as “Great Expectations” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” where she had an aura of “glowing, untouchable greatness” that was right for this character.
Eventually, at her brother’s insistence, Paltrow set a meeting with Safdie at her house and they hit it off right away.
“It was this confluence of events where I came to understand the brilliant genius that Josh is,” Paltrow recalls. “I came to understand who Timmy Chalamet was, which I didn’t know past this sort of cultural phenomenon [around him] and how gifted he was. The script was incredible and I had no one to make dinner for, so I moved to New York and had the most extraordinary time making this film.”
