‘I wasn’t acting: that was me’: how non-actors took over Oscar season

From One Battle to Another to Marty Supreme, supermarket magnates, professors and special agents have been stealing scenes on screen

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triving for realism, Timothée Chalamet knew what the scene required. “I’m really getting in the guy’s face and I’m really trying to get him angry with me,” the lead actor recalled recently about the making of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. “I was saying to Josh, ‘He’s not getting angry with me, he’s not getting angry with me.’”

But it turned out the unnamed extra had been paying attention. Chalamet added: “I did another take, and then the guy said, ‘I was just in jail for 30 years. You really don’t want to fuck with me. You don’t want to see me angry.’ I said to Josh, ‘Holy shit, who do you have me opposite, man?’”

The answer was that Safdie had cast a non-actor – one of many who have roles in Marty Supreme, a fictionalised homage to the mid-20th century table tennis player Marty Reisman. Similarly, Paul Thomas Anderson used people with no prior acting experience for his comedy action thriller One Battle After Another.