Timothée Chalamet had a ball during his visit to CCXP to promote his new movie, Marty Supreme.
The star showed off his dance moves as he took the stage to Soulja Boy‘s 2007 hit “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” while wearing a Marty Supreme jacket featuring the colors of the Brazilian flag. The movie’s director, Josh Safdie, also joined Chalamet at the fan event on the floor of the São Paulo Expo in Brazil on Friday to discuss the film that A24 releases in theaters Dec. 25.
Onlookers cheered loudly as the actor danced briefly to the song. Before taking a seat for a conversation about the film, Chalamet went over to the crowd, where a member of the audience handed him a Brazilian flag with a giant image of the star’s face. Chalamet, wearing a tank top and track pants, draped the flag over his shoulders and then took his seat before eventually removing the flag.
Chalamet was full of energy as he and director Safdie repeatedly reminded fans to go see Marty Supreme when it hits theaters. “If you don’t like good movies, don’t go see Marty Supreme,” Chalamet quipped.
The moderator asked Chalamet what the star himself can learn from his character, Marty Mauser, an aspiring table tennis player in 1950s New York City. “What I take from Marty — what I take with me today — is to keep dreaming, keep believing in yourself, don’t fear negative opinions. If you’ve got the opportunity to come out and do ‘Crank That’ in São Paulo — you know what I’m saying?”
Later that evening, Chalamet and Safdie moved to a different stage for a lengthier panel interview that included clips from the movie, and afterward, attendees received an orange ping-pong ball. Marty Supreme marks the filmmaker’s first solo feature after he and his brother, Benny Safdie, co-directed such acclaimed projects as Good Time and Uncut Gems. Benny Safdie helmed his own A24 sports-focused feature, The Smashing Machine, which hit theaters earlier this year and starred Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt.
Safdie and Chalamet praised the cast of Marty Supreme, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Kevin O’Leary and Tyler, the Creator. According to the director, the movie “is about a hardcore dreamer” and “everything that the world does to a dream to kill it and suppress it.”
When asked about the other performers who inspire him, Chalamet mentioned “the greats before me — the Denzel Washingtons, the Leonardo DiCaprios, the people who laid a path that you aspire to as a young man, as a young artist.”
In his review of Marty Supreme for The Hollywood Reporter, chief film critic David Rooney praised Chalamet’s “hot-wired” performance and wrote that the “genre-defying original is an exhilarating sports comedy, a scrappy character study, a thrumming evocation of early ’50s New York City — plus a reimagining of all those things.”
