Timmy’s Supreme Backlash

There’s been merch, and a viral Zoom call mocking marketing brainstorm meetings, an entourage of human ping pong balls, dancing to Soulja Boy at CCXP, an orange blimp, and a double orange couple outfit with a girlfriend who’s no stranger to controversy – an incomplete list of the chaos Timothée Chalamet has unleashed during the promotional cycle for his new movie, Marty Supreme, opening on Christmas Day. And it all started last year when he won the Screen Actors Award for Best Actor for his performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, declaring that he’s in pursuit of greatness from the stage while holding his trophy and citing the legends among whom he aspires to be included. 

All of this is the behavioural equivalent of theme dressing on a red carpet during a press tour, only Timmy isn’t just dressing like his character, he’s acting like him too. Marty Mauser in Marty Supreme is a bullsh-t artist, a con artist, a scammer, and a thief. He is conceited and arrogant, he is a liar, he is charming and he is devious; he puts himself first and exploits everyone he can – family, friends, lovers, neighbours, no one is immune. One read of the character is that he is American Hubris in the form of a ping pong player, with all the attributes of the individual, even mythological, success stories that have shaped the American dream. And we happen to be living in a moment when, increasingly, that dream is being interrogated, at least for the way it’s been realised, particularly where modern billionaires are concerned. 

So, perhaps right on time, here comes the backlash. From a gossip perspective, it was probably already simmering underneath as a result of Timmy’s relationship with Kylie Jenner and the reputation that follows her family. It’s not just Club Chalamet, there are a lot of people who seem actively invested in blowing up that situation, or anticipating a trajectorial downturn in the fortunes of Hollywood’s young golden boy. Kardashian or not, it’s a familiar showbiz story: we build them up and then we tear them down. Many a celebrity before Timothée Chalamet have been on this ride. 

We’re in the plummet then – what’s going viral right now is an interview Timmy did with Margaret Gardiner, and this answer when he’s asked what he took away from playing Marty Mauser in Marty Supreme. He says “assertiveness” and “confidence” to “call things as it is”, to be able to look back when he’s in his 60s at his interviews and know that he did just that. At which point he launches into self-praise. 

Timmy is already an internet favourite, he can walk through a crowd and pick up a million likes. So you can imagine how social media is reacting to this perceived cockiness and lack of humility. They’re dragging him now, TikTok is yelling at him, the people who are mad are getting loud. And there are Reddit threads about how he’s just torpedoed his Oscar chances. 

A couple of things to note here… 

Let’s start with Margaret Gardiner for those of us in the back who are into the inside baseball of celebrity reporting. Margaret Gardiner is a longstanding member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which is the organisation that votes on the Golden Globes. We’ve covered the sketchiness of the HPFA a lot over the last few years. The Globes are unserious and the people who determine them, especially now that the show is owned by Penske, have been criticised in the past for being even more unserious. 

Margaret is, supposedly, one of the more respected members of the HFPA, even though she was embroiled in a racism scandal a few years ago when she apparently confused Daniel Kaluuya with Leslie Odom Jr. She continues to be actively involved with the Globes, though, and Timmy was just nominated for one but what people are also side-eyeing is that her interview with him has now been pulled down. So the question is whether or not his team saw that it was being negatively perceived and wanted it deleted or if there’s another reason. 

I will say, for what it’s worth, that the Marty Supreme junket has yet to happen. Right now it’s looking like next week, so it could have just been as simple as Margaret jumping the gun and posting her interview before the embargo. Or, you know, it could also be that Timmy’s reps are now doing damage control. 

Is damage control really necessary, though? Do Timmy and his team consider this interview “damage”? He has made it clear that his goal is to be as unhinged and provocative as possible in the marketing and promotion for this movie. He is Gen Z’s biggest actor, he is as aware as anyone else in Hollywood about virality and internet behaviour. He has been intentionally obnoxious for months in service of this character and this film. Do we really think that he would have sucked his own dick in this interview and not anticipated how TikTok would run with it? Sorry, I’m not convinced that the backlash is surprising him. I’m not convinced that he’s not actively courting it either. 

As for his Oscar chances… 

It’s funny to me that there are some people out there who are talking like he’s ruined his shot at the Oscar when for months he’s been as unprescribed as we’ve seen where standard Oscar campaigning is concerned. Even Leonardo DiCaprio is doing the shaking hands and kissing babies thing this award season. Leo is turning up at more campaign stops than Timmy has. As both Sarah and I have noted in the past couple of months, Timmy’s been the outlier, missing from the Academy Museum Gala and the Governors Awards, a no-show at all the galas and in an entirely different lane from the one that the Oscar caravan has been travelling along. His is the anti-campaign campaign, and if there’s a tagline for it, it would be “For Your UNconsideration”.

And on top of all that, missing out on either a nomination or a win fits in perfectly with the Marty Mauser storyline. Marty, in the movie, doesn’t get invited to anything. He crashes every space and place that he wants to get into, a “professional grifter” who f-cks up all the way to the top and then the bottom. As Rolling Stone said in their review of the film, Timmy’s performance “fuses so well with what we, the viewer, think we know about Chalamet that it begins to blur the boundary”. 

Is it off-putting? Yes. But is that the right question or should we be asking “is it supposed to be off-putting?” Does it make a difference? I mean everyone can decide that for themselves. This is what gossiping is. We study celebrities, we compare and contrast them, we form opinions of them, we share with each other those assessments, and those assessments reveal more about us than the public figure we think we understand. Rinse and repeat. 

It remains to be seen, or it may never be seen, whether or not Timothée Chalamet is punking this entire process in the age of TikTok, testing the limits of fame, celebrity, and popularity 15 years after Joaquin Phoenix did it with disastrous results. Will it cost him? It did cost Joaquin, for a while, and Casey Affleck’s subsequent scandal didn’t help either. For Timmy, the “cost” in this case that many are pointing to is the Oscar in the short term. It will depend on how the movie does. The movie is sitting at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes right now and a very high 89% at Metacritic, qualifying as “universal acclaim”. That’s the first difference between Timmy and Joaquin right now. I’m Not Here was considered a universal piece of sh-t. Now the next step for Timmy and Marty Supreme is the holiday box office. It was reported a week ago that pre-sales are strong for the movie already, but of course that was before this recent dust-up. Marty Supreme is counterprogramming at the multiplex at Christmas, against Avatar: Fire and Ash and the other blockbusters that are meant to make a billion dollars. Not unlike A Complete Unknown last year. If the movie does well in its category (probably anything north of $15-20 million) writing his Oscar chances off will have been entirely premature and another example that what people are saying on Reddit and TikTok doesn’t line up to what actually happens. If, however, Marty flops then we can start the new year with the anti-Timmy discourse. 

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