“Marty Supreme” director Josh Safdie shed light on star Timothée Chalamet’s decision to get violently spanked on his bare behind for one of the film’s most outrageous moments.
At the New York Film Critics Circle Awards on Tuesday night, Safdie told The Associated Press that he “never got the sense” Chalamet “didn’t want to be spanked” during their extensive conversations about the script.
Even so, the “Uncut Gems” director thought it made sense to have a “butt double” on hand for the scene, where Chalamet’s audacious Ping-Pong prodigy Marty Mauser agrees to be humiliated in exchange for a final swing at his table tennis dreams.
But when it was time to roll, the “Dune” actor was baffled to see a stand-in, purportedly asking Safdie, “What is this guy doing here? It’s my butt.”
Though the filmmaker yielded, he told AP he had Chalamet’s on-screen assailant, “Shark Tank” mogul Kevin O’Leary, rehearse with some whacks at Safdie’s own rear end so his leading man could take as few beatings as possible.
“I said, ‘You go to town on me first and you go as hard as you have to,’” he recalled. “Because I remember [filmmaker] Werner Herzog once saying, ‘I never ask an actor to do something you wouldn’t do yourself.’”
“Marty Supreme” star Timothée Chalamet refused to let a body-double steal his glory in a wild spanking scene featured in the film.
O’Leary, who mirrors his own ruthless business persona as pen entrepreneur Milton Rockwell in the movie, was the first to share how Chalamet refused to let a posterior impersonator steal his glory during a late December appearance on “The Adam Freidland Show.”
Telling the YouTuber how Chalamet wasn’t having it when they suggested shooting with a “stand-in ass,” the Canadian business mogul said, “He wanted to immortalize his ass.”
