Timothée Chalamet is on an anticipatory victory lap. As his performance as table tennis champion Marty Mauser in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme generates Oscar buzz, the young actor’s presence is pervasive. In a ‘leaked’ satirical marketing Zoom, Chalamet pitched a series of over the top marketing strategies like appearing on cereal boxes or painting the Statue of Liberty Marty’s signature ping-pong orange. These outlandish suggestions set the tone of the Marty Supreme guerilla campaign as ambitiously triumphant and inescapable. “Movie marketing is trying to be passive, trying to be chic”, Chalamet declares, “We’re not trying to be chic”.
Chic it is not, flashy it is. In Los Angeles, you could see an orange blimp flying through the clouds. In New York, a snaking queue across SoHo emerged for the Marty Supreme windbreaker worn by athletic legends like Tom Brady, and online, the coveted jacket sells for thousands. Chalamet is an unavoidable champion, even penetrating through our headphones as he features on Scouse rapper EsDeeKid’s viral 4 Raws track to gloat some more. Standing on top of the world (or the chameleonic Vegas Sphere turned ping pong ball), Chalamet revels in his success, and he demands others recognise it too. In a viral interview clip, Chalamet expresses that “it’s been like seven, eight years that [he’s] been handing in really, really committed top-of-the-line performances… [he doesn’t] want people to take it for granted…This is really some top-level shit”. And while critics may dismiss his behavior as self-aggrandizing, in Chalamet’s words, it’s “a movie about the pursuit of a dream… [and he’s] trying to get this out in the biggest way possible. In the spirit of Marty Mauser”.
This campaign makes Chalamet and Marty’s similar ethos clear: they have a shared pursuit of self-actualization through success. As Marty maniacally attempts to legitimize himself to a larger audience through table tennis soundtracked by 80s synth, Chalamet similarly uses Marty as a vehicle to showcase his once in a generation talent to the Academy.
In the wake of Barbenheimer, it’s clear this isn’t Hollywood’s first flashy campaign generated from social media exposure, nor is this Chalamet’s first time leveraging his social media appeal to generate notoriety. Emerging as the internet’s perpetual white boy of the month since starring in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, Chalamet is the closest thing Gen Z has to a true movie star; he secured Best Actor nominations for Call Me By Your Name in 2018 and again for A Complete Unknown in 2025. The latter film’s press tour had a similar online campaign with Chalamet participating in interviews with internet personalities such as Brittany Broski and Nardwar, or most notably attending his own lookalike contest. Despite the campaign’s hype failing to materialize into decorated stardom, he has his eyes set on finally securing a win with Marty Supreme. In his biggest and most ambitious role yet, the Marty Supreme persona functions as an exacerbatory mirror to Chalamet’s ambitions.
Fans of Chalamet’s earlier European sensibilities lament his supposed show pony arrogance. Ideally to them, Chalamet would emerge for the public only to deliver his signature emotive performance before retreating to daintily smoke a cigarette or write poetry instead of walking a red carpet with girlfriend Kylie Jenner in matching orange latex. Despite that being just another projected persona, it reveals that we don’t want to believe stars need to ostentatiously compete for our attention to maintain their allure. We subconsciously still believe in the power of golden age movie stardom, an era where there wasn’t a smaller screen competing for our attention.
The rise of social media and streaming has brought about the democratisation of culture, but as director Martin Scorsese pointed out in an article for Harper’s Magazine, this evolution has created an emphasis on content over curation. While streaming may appear more democratic, it is ultimately algorithmic, and it risks diluting film into consumer fodder rather than a piece of art meant to be dissected and critiqued.
Chalamet points out that Marty Supreme is “an original film at a time when original movies aren’t really being put out”, and in an era with diminishing theatre attendance coupled with the proliferation of streaming and doomscrolling, energizing an audience into sitting in a theatre for two-and-a-half hours to engage with an independent, auteurial film is a difficult task. Although film is in direct competition with social media, it’s fighting the battle on their turf. In an oversaturated algorithm, movie marketing relies on gimmicky memorability in order to attain virality, which will surely sell the film. So when the internet begins to speculate that Chalamet is secretly EsDeeKid in disguise, Marty Supreme’s marketing campaign lets the public know they’re in on the joke when he appears for a verse.
The Oscar sweeping film Oppenheimer benefited from a similar guerilla campaign produced by internet memes ironically pairing it with Barbie due to their identical release dates. But despite the film’s virality and acclaim, the campaign may have been more memorable than the film itself. When thinking back on Oppenheimer, the titular character’s reckoning with the possibility of an apocalyptic future of his own creation comes to mind. But to the public, it’s likely the juxtaposition of the shiny pink barbie standing next to the brooding Cillian Murphy is the more immediate image, rendering Oppenheimer into a contrasting marketing aesthetic rather than an independent, promethean figure. In Marty Supreme, the campaign’s iconic orange ping-pong balls only get literal air time when chucked out an apartment window in flurries, and as Marty plays the match with the highest personal stakes, they’re nowhere to be found. Like the marketing, they represent Marty’s aspirations of a dominating legacy, but security guards in orange ping-pong helmets surrounding the Oscar-hopeful Chalamet shroud their symbolic futility in the film itself.
Chalamet laments that “people’s attention spans are so short these days… How do you convince them to go to the cinema… rather than waiting to stream it illegally, or for it to be available on Netflix?… I have an audience, so I engage with them, and I give 150 per cent”. According to The Guardian, “Marty Supreme had the biggest per theatre average opening for a film since 2016”, and it’s undoubtedly due to Chalamet’s proliferated stardom.
But as the algorithm flits to the next viral sensation and theatre attendance dwindles further, actors like Chalamet will have to perform not only for their roles, but also for the increasingly bloated pageant of marketing. Like Chalamet, Marty remarks in the film that he is somewhat of a performer himself. As the story progresses and he subjects himself to increasingly chaotic and degrading situations in order to pursue his dream on a world stage, it isn’t hard to see a frightening similarity in Chalamet’s own pursuit. Time will tell if he succeeds and secures an Oscar, but if the campaign claims to be in the true spirit of Marty Mauser, the film’s legacy may be reduced to the very spectacle that lionized it in the first place.
