‘Marty Supreme’: When the character jumps out of the screen

Last spring, I took a class with professor of archeology Michael Shanks. And if you’ve ever heard of Shanks, you know that — even in Silicon Valley — he is quite the personality. 

Donning a fashionable scarf and a thick British accent, Shanks is a thrilling lecturer. In class, I enjoyed watching him take a Japanese dry-erase marker and frantically scribble vaguely constellated concepts on the whiteboard. Weaving complex threads to the point of no return, in his farfetched rants he sometimes resembled an erudite version of Trump — that is, if Trump had a fiery passion for abstract archaeological discourse. 

At one point while discussing pop culture and film, Shanks did something that pricked me: while discussing the plot of a film, he only referred to characters by the actor or actress who played them. For instance, when discussing “Oppenheimer,” Shanks would only refer to Cillian Murphy and never the movie’s titular character. Initially, I challenged him on this point: “Professor, don’t you mean Dr. Oppenheimer?” I remember him staunchly standing his ground: “No! The movie isn’t about Oppenheimer, it’s about Cillian!” He was cryptic, but seemed to have a point. 

I didn’t quite fully understand what Shanks meant until I saw 2025’s Christmas Day blockbuster: “Marty Supreme.”

Directed by Josh Safdie, “Marty Supreme” is a riot. The movie tells the fictional story of Marty Mauser, a rising 1950s table-tennis star who seeks to be the absolute best by any means possible… until he eventually finds himself in a comedy of (brutally criminal) errors in pursuit of this purpose. A rollercoaster ride of a movie, it oscillates seamlessly between “Rocky”-esque training montages and “Scarface”-esque shootouts. Some viewers may criticize it for glorifying hyper-masculine narcissism. I, personally, liked it — though this may have been preempted by the absurd (and nearly unavoidable) hype surrounding its release.

The film notably gained wide-scale attention for its unorthodox, and quite frankly ridiculous, marketing campaign. A24 (the film’s production company) put Chalamet on top of Vegas’ sphere, produced a trendy “Marty Supreme” windbreaker (which went viral after being worn by celebrities from Tom Brady to Justin Bieber) and even flew a “Marty Supreme” blimp. 

Most interesting to me in the lead-up to the film was Chalamet’s speech after a SAG-AFTRA award win for his role in “A Complete Unknown.” In it, Chalamet gave a sincere plea about his own pursuit of greatness, aiming to achieve heights akin to Michael Jordan and Phelps. Chalamet’s competitive tone uncannily mirrors the sporty sentiments voiced by his character in “Marty Supreme” — something he later attributed to being in the “energy of the tone of the [Marty Supreme] character” and now dismisses as an “ephemeral pursuit.” Nevertheless, it was a strange, curiosity-piquing moment in which the lines between the actor Timothée Chalamet and his character Marty Mauser noticeably began to blur.

Blending story and reality

There is a sort of hyperreality at play in the event of “Marty Supreme” — and it truly was an event. Though originally conceived as a film, through its promotional activities the story inevitably transgressed into a multi-media experience, blurring the lines between narrative and reality. This is most evident in one especially meta marketing ploy: a scripted video of a “leaked” marketing meeting between Timothée Chalamet and A24. The YouTube video, titled “Timothee_Chalamet_internal_brand_marketing_meeting_MartySupreme_11.08.2025.mp4,” depicts a 15-minute long Zoom call in which Chalamet pitches different marketing ideas for the movie to a team of A24 employees.

Watching the video, one is easily confused. Is this real? Scripted? It is truly a puzzle to decipher whether the A24 team is taking Chalamet’s absurd ideas seriously, or if they are in fact paid actors who don’t work for A24 at all. Reality and fiction again blend here, where Chalamet opts to play a fictional character. But this time, confusingly, he portrays an ultra-competitive caricature of himself — though one quickly loses track of what is an act and what is real. For instance, many of the outlandish pitches in this sketch became actual marketing stunts executed in the “real” world. Thus, the video served as but one part of a mind-boggling transmedia event in which reality became fiction and fiction became reality. 

It is not novel for a strong performance to infringe on an actor’s actual sense of self. Infamously, Austin Butler struggled to rid himself of an Elvis accent after playing the Memphis rockstar in a 2022 biopic. But the hyperreal phenomenon of “Marty Supreme” illustrates a different point, the same which Shanks insightfully made last spring: In visual media, it is naive to differentiate the character from the actor. Sure, actors are simply “playing a part”. But performances such as Chalamet’s upend the fragile divide between who someone “is” and who someone might pretend to be. 

It seems apt that Marty Supreme’s hyperreal execution comes at a time when not just movie stars, but ordinary people, are increasingly compelled to represent themselves in visual media. Whether in Instagram feeds, Hinge profiles or LinkedIn posts, it is near impossible to escape marketing oneself via an array of images on a screen. 

As many Stanford students know, in order to pursue success in life — whether it’s table-tennis, acting or getting that top-notch internship — we have to tell a convincing story about ourselves. We have to embody a certain role to reach the level of accomplishment we desire. However, as Timothée Chalamet’s meta-performance in “Marty Supreme” reminds us, it’s easy to lose ourselves in the characters we portray. 

At the end of the day, “Marty Supreme”’s abnormal strategy worked. The movie has received commercial and critical success, Chalamet won a Golden Globe for best actor and the movie has already become A24’s second-highest grossing film since its Dec. 25 release. But we still may ask: Was the performance worth the product? Was it worth it for the actor to become — even if momentarily — inseparable from the character? Though we may think these questions are Chalamet’s to answer alone, perhaps anyone pursuing such fame or greatness must confront similar dilemmas in due time.

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