‘Shark Tank’ star Kevin O’Leary made his acting debut co-starring Timothée Chalamet in A24’s ‘Marty Supreme,’ and one of his standout scenes is when he hits the Oscar-nominated actor with a ping-pong paddle.
In the sports drama directed by Josh Safdie, O’Leary plays Milton Rockwell, a successful Penn entrepreneur who is married to retired actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow). After Chalamet’s coveted table tennis champion Marty Moser gets entangled with Kaye, Chalamet realizes that Milton could be his ticket to the world championships in Tokyo, but it comes at a humiliating price.
In an interview with Variety, O’Leary said Chalamet had the option of leaving the set, but the 30-year-old insisted that his real butt be featured in the movie.
“When it came time to take him down, there was stunt butt there. Kagemusha was there,” O’Leary said. “[Chalamet]didn’t do that. He said he would do it himself. He didn’t want to immortalize other guys.”
O’Leary had planned to use a fake paddle to soften the blow, but the prop broke immediately on the first blow, so he had to use a real paddle. Filming the scene “lasted hours,” he said, and Safdie required about 40 takes until 4 a.m.
“Josh said, ‘You’ve got to roll it up harder,'” O’Leary recalled. “I was really hitting him.”
O’Leary said the spanking sequence was a “vital humiliation scene” for Marty, but was necessary for the cocky ping-pong hustler because “Marty made me so angry and insulted me so many times that the death penalty was warranted.”
“I’ve never been satisfied that he suffered enough for what he did,” O’Leary says of his protagonist. “I’m still angry.”
“Marty Supreme” premiered on December 25th and immediately grossed $17.4 million, making it the second-biggest opening weekend in A24 history. The film received critical acclaim and sparked Oscar buzz for Chalamet, with many awards pundits considering him a front-runner for Best Actor.
