First things first: Marty Supreme, which is about an aspiring ping-pong champion named Marty Mauser (played by Timothée Chalamet) in 1950s New York, features an incredible ensemble of actors, and many of its casting choices are clever and even inspired—casting Fran Drescher as Marty’s mom, for instance, was a stroke of pure genius. This is not a list of those people. This is about all the others—the many, many people who aren’t actors per se but show up in this movie. What Highlights magazine is to squirrels, Marty Supreme is to actors who are famous for everything but acting: It’s lousy with them, from fashion’s Isaac Mizrahi to “Man With the Golden Voice” Ted Williams.
In his previous movies (made with his brother, Benny), director Josh Safdie revealed a fondness for casting nonactors, people whom he and his brother discovered on the street, in diners, and so on. This is not a list of all the people like that, though there are many. Instead, this is a list of all the people in Marty Supreme who aren’t actors but are famous elsewhere. Whether you want to know who to look for or you’ve already seen the movie and want to know who you just saw, here is an annotated list, helpfully ranked from most exciting to least. (Please let me know if you think I missed someone.)
16. Mitchell Wenig
Consider this one a bonus: Though Wenig, who plays essentially a henchman in this movie, has acted in a few movies now, the main thing he’s known for is appearing in previous Safdie films. You may remember his bald head and fuzzy triangle of hair from Uncut Gems, but there were two of him then, because Wenig’s brother Stewart was also in that movie. Did the Safdie brothers’ breakup force them to split custody of the Wenig brothers? Because we’re only getting 50 percent of the previous level of Wenig and also because this one only sort of counts, this gets last place.
14 and 15. Kemba Walker and Tracy McGrady
Walker and McGrady are both former NBA players (Walker retired last year and McGrady in 2013), and they show up as 1950s Harlem Globetrotters in Marty Supreme. After Kevin Garnett’s part in Uncut Gems, it’s clear that the Safdies love basketball, but I’d love to hear sports fans’ theories about why Josh Safdie included these two in particular in this movie. Is their relative randomness part of it? This movie is definitely interested in the athletes that don’t make history books. In any case, their low ranking is mostly due to the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it length of their cameo.
13. Larry “Ratso” Sloman
Sloman, a veteran of several Safdie movies who is in his 70s, plays Marty’s uncle Murray Norkin, who wants his nephew to give up ping-pong and make an honest living as a shoe salesman. “Ratso,” who was given that name by his former girlfriend Joan Baez, is a bit of New York counterculture character—he wrote for Rolling Stone, wrote a book with Bob Dylan, ghostwrote a bunch of other books, and a few years ago started attempting a music career of his own.
12. David Mamet
Mamet plays the director of the play Gwyneth Paltrow’s character, Kay Stone, is starring in within the movie, which isn’t much of a stretch, because he’s a playwright and director in real life—Glengarry Glen Ross is the play of his that most people have heard of. (He’s also actress Zosia Mamet’s father.) Mamet doesn’t act much, though he did notably also play a rabbi in Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid. His inclusion in the movie is cool and insider-y, but he doesn’t actually do much on screen, which is why he’s ranked here.
11. Isaac Mizrahi
Mizrahi is a fashion designer who once argued on QVC that the moon is a planet, but he’s also done a fair bit of acting, often playing himself on fashion-forward shows like Sex and the City and Gossip Girl. Here, he plays the actress Kay Stone’s publicist, Merle, who memorably tells Marty, “When you see this lady act, you’re gonna feel like you got your cock sucked by a vacuum cleaner.” He’s perfect in the role, but he’s been in too many things to get a higher ranking here.
10. John Catsimatidis
While other first-time actors come from movie-adjacent fields like fashion and the arts, Safdie gets extra credit for plucking Catsimatidis out of New York City infamy but everywhere-else obscurity. He gets a few minutes of screentime as the father of Marty’s friend Dion, who along with his son invests in Marty’s idea for a line of orange ping-pong balls. He’s a businessman, much like Catsimatidis himself, who is the CEO of the grocery chain Gristedes as well as a real estate developer and former mayoral candidate.
9. Ted Williams
You may not know Williams’ face, but you might remember his voice and his story. In 2011, a video of Williams, a former radio announcer who was homeless at the time, went viral. In it, he demonstrated that, even though he didn’t look like it, he could still speak in that distinctive pleasing announcer cadence. In the aftermath of the video, some opportunities came Williams’ way, but he also continued to struggle and sometimes regretted ever getting famous. It’s very nice to see him healthy and employed here. His experiences also feel resonant with Marty’s, a parable about the limits of talent.
8. George Gervin
Former pro basketball player Gervin plays Lawrence, an older man who runs a ping-pong club where Marty practices and occasionally sleeps. (Gervin’s only other acting credit is playing himself in Uncle Drew, a 2018 comedy that starred Kyrie Irving and Shaquille O’Neal.) Gervin, going by the nickname “Iceman,” played for the Spurs in the 1970s and 1980s, and was regarded as one of the best players of the era, known especially for his “finger roll” shot. For his last season in the league, he was traded to the Bulls, where he played alongside a then-up-and-coming youngster named Michael Jordan. In other words, Gervin’s real-life story of being adjacent to sports greatness makes him a perfect fit for this movie.
7. Mariann Tepedino
Tepedino appears in the first scene of the film as a customer Marty is helping at his uncle’s shoe store. She has a couple of other credits on IMDb, but she is niche-famous to one very specific demographic: listeners of The Howard Stern Show. Stern fans know Tepedino as “Mariann from Brooklyn,” and her frequent calls into the show (and signature Brooklyn accent) have earned her unofficial mascot status and membership in what Stern calls his “Wack Pack.” The Daily Beast profiled her in 2013, dubbing her Stern’s “biggest fan.” On Instagram, where she has more than 50,000 followers, you can hear a clip of her recounting her experience working with “Timothée Cham-o-lay,” as she pronounced it, on air. As great as this backstory is, her part is tiny, hence her spot here.
6. Philippe Petit
Petit is a high-wire artist whose most famous accomplishment is his 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. (There’s a documentary, Man on Wire, about it.) In Marty Supreme, he has a tiny part as an MC at a Harlem Globetrotters game in Brussels—he introduces the half-time act, in which Marty faces off in ping-pong against a seal. All I can say is that putting the only guy to ever walk between the Twin Towers in a movie and giving him this particular role is pure Safdie casting chaos.
5. Penn Jillette
It’s not very often that you fail to spot 6’6” man, but I didn’t recognize magician Penn Jillette either of the times I saw the movie. To be fair, he’s without the facial hair he usually sports for his role as a farmer Marty encounters while looking for a lost dog in New Jersey. He also takes on, let’s say, a very different affect than his regular animated persona. Jillette has done a lot of acting (shoutout to his recurring role on Sabrina the Teenage Witch), so his casting isn’t quite as much of a novelty as some others, but he gets points for disappearing into a more serious role.
4. Pico Iyer
Iyer is a well-regarded travel writer and essayist who now has a single acting credit to his name, as Marty Supreme’s Ram Sethi, a haughty table tennis official who seems to be the one person Marty can’t hustle. It’s actually a pretty big part for a nonactor! As for how Iyer ended up in the movie, it probably has something to do with the TED Talk he once gave called “What Ping-Pong Taught Me About Life.”
3. Naomi Fry
Like Iyer, Fry is also a writer taking on her first acting role: She plays actress Kay Stone’s assistant during a play rehearsal. In real life, Fry writes funny cultural commentary for the New Yorker and appears on its Critics at Large podcast. And this star turn isn’t actually all that surprising because she has a knack for ending up in unexpected places, whether it’s on Instagram hanging out with John Mayer, in a photo the camera pans by on The Bear, or as a namedrop on Hacks. While I am biased for finding it thrilling that Safdie gave this role to a (sort of) workaday journalist, this casting is yet another example of the director’s talent for spotting people with the kind of interesting faces and auras you won’t see in other movies.
2. Tyler, the Creator
Should this even count for this list? Debatable. Best known as a rapper, Tyler has acted before, but never in a part this big or buzzy. He is vibrant and hilarious as taxi driver Wally, Marty’s friend and partner in hustling who has slightly better judgment but is unlucky enough to get caught up in Marty’s schemes regardless.
1. Kevin O’Leary
You may have already heard that a panelist from Shark Tank is in this movie, but the only more surprising thing than that is that a panelist from Shark Tank is great in this movie. O’Leary plays Milton Rockwell, the CEO of a pen company who is married to Kay Stone. (Yes, the guy from Shark Tank is married to Gwyneth Paltrow in this! It just keeps getting more improbable!) Though Marty is way more dishonest than Rockwell in this movie, there’s something sinister about him, and that’s by design. As Safdie recently explained in an interview, he cast O’Leary not in spite of but because he’s “known for being an asshole.” He “exudes corporate colonialism,” and that makes him the ideal choice for this part. Though it, too, is also arguably too big a part to count for this list, it was an audacious move that paid off. Since I can’t very well offer it $100,000 for a 20 percent equity stake, the least I can do is give it first place.