Timothée Chalamet endured an eye infection during the shooting of Marty Supreme. But what is more shocking is that he willfully took the physical toll.
His character, a table tennis player, wore double glasses and contact lenses, which caused him to feel dizzy and see double.
“Josh wanted my eyes beadier,” he tells UPI, referring to director Josh Safdie. “That’s an easy example to cut me off from my comfort zone.”
The filmmaker provides the remaining details. “We put +6.5 contact lenses in the eyes, then you put -6.5 glasses on top so you can actually get the sense that you can feel a life of impairment. The first time, he texted me, he said, ‘I am dizzy. I am so dizzy right now.'”
Constant use of this during shooting gave him an eye infection, but Timothée adds, “It was great in the morning to be like, ‘I have evidence that I can’t do this every day. Never have I felt so good to get an eye infection and go okay, I can say to him I pushed it this far.”
As for playing table tennis, which is central to his character, the Dune star shared that he trained in sports for 7 years to master himself.
“This was about a six to seven year training process. I met with [director] Josh Safdie in 2018 about this film,” he earlier said on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
But it was on-and-off training, but when the pandemic hit, the Academy-nominated actor recalled, “Now, I don’t mean day in and day out, it’s more like on and off… It was a lot of training. It started during covid and ping pong is a great thing.”
Marty Supreme debuts in theatres on Dec 25.
