Kevin O’Leary Remembers Kicking Timothee Chalamet’s Butt in Marty Supreme (Excl)

Kevin O’Leary And Timothée Chalametthe intense bare butt paddle scene in Marty Supreme was just as crazy to film as it was on screen.

“We had a fake paddle that had a hinge and a foam. It was supposed to not hurt. It didn’t work. It broke immediately,” O’Leary, 71, exclusively told. Us every week in advance Marty SupremeReleased Thursday, December 25. “So we came up with a real paddle, made of wood, like a real paddle, with grooves on the surface.”

O’Leary, who plays businessman Milton Rockwell in the biopic, explained that while there was a “double ass” for Chalamet, the actor ultimately wanted to be the one performing the scene, which sees main character Marty (Chalamet) apologize to Milton after missing a few exhibition ping-pong matches. After Marty’s begging, Milton asks the young athlete to pull down his pants and bend over to spank him.

“Timmy came in. [and] said, ‘No, it must be my ass.’ I’m going to immortalize my butt on film in perpetuity,” O’Leary recalled, adding that he tried to talk Chalamet out of it once he realized he was going to “hit him” with the non-prop paddle. “And he said, ‘I’m doing it.’ So we started hitting the cheeks left and right and left and right to try to keep the red the same intensity.

While O’Leary “could feel the heat” of Chalamet’s butt after about “20 takes,” the director Josh Safdie said the Shark tank star, he “didn’t hit him hard enough” and the scene didn’t “feel real.” (“Now I know you’re a sick puppy,” O’Leary recalls jokingly.)

“I came up like a baseball bat and nailed him in the right cheek, and I think his eyeballs exploded out of his head, and that’s what you see,” O’Leary said of the shot used in the final edit. “His reaction to that was just awesome.”

O’Leary admitted he was impressed by the “crazy soldier” Chalamet was on set.

“I have a newfound respect for this kid,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it. And he deserves an Oscar.”

In recent weeks, Chalamet has echoed similar sentiments regarding his performance, which he deemed award-worthy. THE Dune star finally received a violent reaction for his confident stance, but from O’Leary’s point of view, Marty Supreme is no different from Chalamet’s previous roles.

“I did everything I could knowing that I was going to be in front of him looking at all his stuff, the Dune stuff, everything [is] so good. And I can tell you this with certainty, and I’m right, it’s his best performance by a factor of 100 percent,” O’Leary said. “It’s beyond anything he’s ever done. And he went to a new place. He just did it. And there I was. I’ve seen this happen. I was in the room and I was like, “Wow, this guy is really crazy. »

Coming from the world of reality television, seeing Chalamet’s process of becoming Marty was a whirlwind experience for O’Leary because of his ability to “riff” and “improvise.”

“When I saw the final cut, they took scripted lines and merged them with improvised riffs. And that’s why the kinetic energy is there, the best of the best of every scene. Even if it was a mistake,” he said. “Chalamet kind of works in every scene where he gets up, comes back, sits down, and he’s in Marty, like, he’s not Chalamet anymore. He’s Marty. And the sparks fly from him, and if you upset him, you just move towards him.”

Marty Supreme follows rising table tennis star Marty Mauser’s journey to becoming a professional champion, following him on his journey from the Lower East Side to international tournaments. . The sports comedy is loosely based on the career of a real table tennis pro. Marty Reisman.

O’Leary made his acting debut in Marty Supreme after being one of the emblematic moguls of the Shark tank for almost two decades. The business mogul explained that while he was excited to try acting, some members of his team weren’t sure if they could make the transition.

“‘Look, Kevin, this is acting. This is a script. This is a script. You’re not a scripted guy. You’re a reality TV guy. We’ve built a great franchise with you,” O’Leary recalled telling someone on his team. “He said, ‘I have to be transparent with you… as representatives, some of us don’t like that. We think you’re going to fuck up.’ These are the words he used.

Despite the naysayers, O’Leary was adamant he was going to try something new.

“And I said, ‘Well, how do you know I’m going to shit the bed?’ How can anyone know something until I try it? Because I think you want to keep your life interesting, you have to get out of your comfort zone,” he mused, “And so they sent the script.”

After printing the script, one of O’Leary’s friends saw some paper on the businessman’s deck and decided to read it while watching the sunrise. The friend, who was unfamiliar with Safdie’s work, was captivated by the story.

“He says, Kevin, who wrote that? What sick, fucked up, crazy puppy wrote that?” I said, “Why do you ask?” » He said, “It’s sick.” It’s sick, but I can’t stop reading it, and I can’t stop and you must be this guy, Milton Rockwell,'” he explained. “It’s crazy… it got me because here’s a random guy, he [didn’t] I didn’t know anything about the story, and he was hooked, like, just fascinated. And I was like, “S***, this is going to be a good movie.” »

Still, O’Leary didn’t make it easy for Safdie. Asked if he could meet them in New York to discuss the project, O’Leary responded by offering to fly to him for a meeting at his lake house near Toronto.

“I said, ‘What if [a] new idea? I will send a plane. You get on board, you fly here, and we read this together on my dock with the ducks passing by and the sun going down and coming up, in a peaceful environment,” he recalls. “And I thought it was also a bit of a test to see how serious they were, because if they’re going to do this, then they must be serious. So they did and they came.

Although he was excited to take on Rockwell’s challenge, O’Leary admitted he was initially “dissatisfied” with his character’s ending – but worked with Safdie to deliver something he felt justified Milton’s journey.

“If I were really Milton Rockwell, I would never let that little bastard do that to me, and I would rip his heart out,” he joked, adding that he ended up collaborating with the writing team on a different ending. “It completely changed my outlook on things, because we came up with the ending on a collaborative basis. I’m not going to say I wrote it, but I told them I was unhappy, and they gave me a path to where I was happy. And I’m very happy with the way it ends.”

Marty Supreme hits theaters on Thursday, December 25.