Who is Marty Reisman, the Jewish ping-pong star who inspired Timothée Chalamet’s new movie?
Marty Reisman was the inspiration for ‘Marty Supreme,’ the new Timothée Chalamet movie about a Jewish ping-pong star
Timothée Chalamet, left, and Marty Reisman, the real life ping-pong champion who inspired the Marty Supreme movie. Photo by Elisabetta A. Villa/Getty Images; Dario Cantatore/Getty Images
By Benyamin Cohen August 13, 2025
Timothée Chalamet has been Bob Dylan and Willy Wonka — and now, in his latest high-wire act, a Jewish ping-pong hustler in bell-bottoms. The Oscar-nominated Complete Unknown star is front and center in Marty Supreme, a sports film from director Josh Safdie that trades Dune’s deserts for the Lower East Side.
The trailer, released Wednesday, introduces Marty Mauser, inspired by real-life Jewish ping-pong champion Marty Reisman. Gwyneth Paltrow glides in as the actress who catches his eye; Fran Drescher plays his mother; and Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary makes his feature film debut. The movie also includes a Forward delivery truck cameo parked on a Lower East Side street like it’s been waiting decades for its close-up.
Here’s everything you need to know.
Who is Marty Reisman?
Reisman is the real-life Jewish ping-pong legend who turned table tennis into a hustle, an art form and sometimes a circus act. He was the kind of guy who, according to his 2012 obituary, would measure the net with a $100 bill, could split a cigarette in half from across the net, and, if the stakes were high enough, play blindfolded. He opened for the Harlem Globetrotters. He gambled and lost fortunes, then won them back. He crusaded for the old-school “hardbat” racket long after the sport moved on, because it made a better sound. He was a showman in a Borsalino hat.
Who are the other famous Jewish ping-pong champions?
In the 1930s, Hungary’s Viktor Barna won 22 world titles. Romania’s Angelica Rozeanu racked up 17 world titles and Austria’s Richard Bergmann, who fled the Nazis for Britain, won seven.
Alojzy Ehrlich, a famous Polish table tennis champion, once had such a long match — 2 hours and 12 minutes — that the ball crossed the net more than 12,000 times. During the Holocaust, he was sent to Auschwitz, but was saved from the gas chambers when a guard recognized him.
Traute Kleinová, a Czech champion, won multiple world titles before surviving both Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. And Leah Neuberger, the American powerhouse with 29 national titles, toured China during President Nixon’s Ping-Pong diplomacy.
In 2016, a teenaged Estee Ackerman, a Modern Orthodox ping-pong sensation from Long Island, abstained from playing on Shabbat and still rose in the national rankings — a story immortalized in a children’s book, Ping-Pong Shabbat.
So, you mentioned something about a Forward cameo?
An eagle-eyed reader, Leah Strock, spotted a truck emblazoned with Forverts in Yiddish, followed by “The Jewish Daily Forward — New York’s Largest Daily” on the Manhattan set of the film in October 2024.
The prop truck appears to be modeled on a 1968 Getty photo of Isaac Bashevis Singer standing outside the Forward building on the Lower East Side. The Nobel Prize–winning Jewish novelist — a leading light in Yiddish literary circles — began writing for the paper in 1935, serializing novels and publishing short stories that helped define its modernist edge.
Who’s behind the camera?
Josh Safdie, in his first solo feature since 2008, co-wrote Marty Supreme with Ronald Bronstein, his frequent collaborator. Safdie, with his brother Benny, made Good Time and Uncut Gems into kinetic, anxiety-inducing tales set in New York City. Here, the Jewish filmmaker is working with a reported $70 million budget — said to be studio A24’s biggest yet — on a film that looks broader in scope than anything he’s made before.
When does it come out?
Marty Supreme hits theaters on Dec. 25, 2025. So this year, after you’ve polished off your Christmas lo mein and Hallmark rewatch, you can trade your sugar plums for spin shots in Chalamet’s latest.
