Marty Supreme, which just secured nine Oscar nominations, including one for Timothée Chalamet as Best Actor, is a madcap sports/crime movie about a 1950s table tennis hustler trying to become world champion. It’s a story about the point where blind ambition bleeds into overconfidence and brings everything crashing down on your head.
It’s also, it turns out, secretly a vampire movie. And it was nearly not so secret.
[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Marty Supreme.]
In one of the wildest moments in a movie full of wild moments, Marty Mauser (Chalamet) defies the manipulative pen baron Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) who has bankrolled his trip to Tokyo to face the world champion. O’Leary spits back an unforgettable line: “I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire. I’ve been around forever.”
In the movie, it’s hard to know how to take the line. It seems like it’s a metaphor for the self-sustaining dominance of capitalist wealth, and an expression by O’Leary’s character of the eternal, evil strength of his will. But it was actually meant literally, at least at one point.
The vampire line was O’Leary’s idea. The businessman and TV personality — also known as Mr. Wonderful and for his role on Shark Tank, and quite comfortable with playing the heel — came up with it while workshopping with Marty Supreme writer-director Josh Safdie.
“We were trying to figure out, how would Kevin O’Leary react to this kid saying to him that money doesn’t matter to him, there are other things that are more important,” Safdie told director Sean Baker on the A24 podcast. “And he said, ‘I would never do anything that could ever implicate me in any other way, so I would use the dark arts. I would look to him and I would say, “Marty, I was born in 1601, I’m a vampire.” I look at Ronnie [Bronstein, co-writer and producer] and we’re like, ‘Oh my god!’”
Safdie and Bronstein originally intended to literalize the bizarre threat in an extended coda for the film that would have shown decades of Marty’s later life as he gives up on ping-pong and becomes a successful shoe retailer. It would have ended on Marty with his granddaughter at a Tears for Fears concert in 1987 (the band’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” plays over the film’s end credits).
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Safdie told Baker. “They’ve got great seats, up front, and he’s watching it, and he’s thinking about ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World,’ and youth, and what does it mean? And he has all this success but he’s not doing the thing he believes he was put on this planet to do. I’m on his eyes — we built the prosthetics for Timmy and everything — and Mr. Wonderful shows up behind him and takes a bite out of his neck. And that was the last [shot]. And he hasn’t aged.
“And I remember A24 and everyone were like: ‘This is a mistake, right?’”
Safdie ultimately sided with the producers and cut the montage and its surprise vampiric conclusion. But since it was in the script at one point, it implies that the Milton Rockwell character is, canonically, a real vampire. That’s certainly true in the mind of the actor, successful capitalist, and internet villain who played him.
It’s fun to consider that vampires exist in Marty Supreme’s world, and the ending Safdie described would have been hilarious. But maybe O’Leary’s immortal line works better on its own, in all its startling ambiguity. Either way, the meaning of the movie isn’t changed. Capital will dominate you and suck the life out of you; the wild dreams of youth might make you a fool, even a jerk, but they might also be your best defence.
