What the Hell Is Kevin O’Leary Doing in Marty Supreme? |
“They said, ‘We’re looking for a real asshole, and you’re it,’” Kevin O’ Leary told TMZ about when Josh Safdie and his co-writer Ronald Bronstein approached him to play a key supporting role in their squalid, 1950s picaresque Marty Supreme. The film concerns a callow ping-pong prodigy (Timothée Chalamet) trying to scrounge together the money to play in a high-profile tournament in Tokyo. O’Leary plays a nasty high-roller debating whether or not to act as the kid’s benefactor.
Set a thief to cast a thief, as they say, and hire an asshole to play an asshole; sometimes, the simplest solution is the correct one. If O’Leary’s account lacks the apocryphal star-is-born romanticism of Lana Turner being scouted at a soda fountain on Sunset Boulevard or Harrison Ford cold-reading for Star Wars while installing doors for Francis Ford Coppola, the end result is still one for the books. “I think Ronnie and Josh did the right thing. Just saying, ‘Look, just be yourself and let’s see what happens,’” O’Leary said in that same TMZ interview.
There’s always been a line-blurring element to Safdie’s casting decisions; the movies he made with his brother Benny are rife with actors either playing against type (like Robert Pattinson as a hood rat in Good Time) or else celebrities doing imitations of themselves. But Arielle Holmes, the star-slash-biographical-subject of 2014’s Heaven Knows What, was an........