“They said “We're looking for the real asshole, and that's you,” Kevin O'Leary said. TMZ about how Josh Safdie and his co-writer Ronald Bronstein approached him to play a key supporting role in their seedy 1950s picaresque film. Marty Supreme. The film follows an inexperienced ping pong genius (Timothée Chalamet) as he tries to raise money to enter a high-profile tournament in Tokyo. O'Leary plays an obnoxious high roller debating whether or not to act as a child's benefactor.
Put the thief, as they say, to throw the thief, and hire an asshole to play the asshole; sometimes the simplest solution is the right one. If O'Leary's story lacks the apocryphal romanticism of a star born of Lana Turner being discovered at a soda fountain on Sunset Boulevard or Harrison Ford's cold reading for Star wars when installing doors for Francis Ford Coppola, the end result still goes unnoticed. “I think Ronnie and Josh did the right thing. They just said, 'Look, just be yourself and we'll see what happens,'” O'Leary said in a similar vein. TMZ interview.
There was always an element of blurring of boundaries in the Safdies' casting decisions; The films he made with his brother Benny are replete with actors playing either against type (e.g. Robert Pattinson as the hooded rat in Good time) or celebrities imitating themselves. But Ariel Holmes, star of the 2014 biopic God knows whatwas unknown: an uncut gem. O'Leary's reputation is real, and it precedes him in a different way than, say, Uncut GemsKevin Garnett.
Given his right-wing political views and well-documented legal problems, O'Leary's presence poses a real risk to Marty Supremedistributor A24; his sound bite during the press tour that Safdie and his producers could “save millions of dollars” by replacing crowds of extras in period garb with AI-generated simulacra split the difference between genuine insufferability and self-aware rage bait. (If you want to piss off the arts people right now, try touting the virtues of AI.) Quality is important, though, and O'Leary stands his ground. In a film that seeks to allegorize American exceptionalism through the figure of the eponymous ping-pong wizard Timothée Chalamet, it's surprising that the former Montrealer ends up delivering the best “Ugly American.”
In truth, it's hard to come up with a real precedent for O'Leary's work here. It's not worth comparing him to the other infamous non-actors who starred in the memorable film, partly because it's not a meta-fictional gambit like Jordan Belfort's in Coda The Wolf of Wall Street or Elon Musk chopping it unnaturally into Iron Man 2— and partly because calling O'Leary a non-actor goes against the nature of his stunts.
Note that no one is suggesting that Mr. Wonderful is secretly a good guy; the next former colleague or associate (or plaintiff) to make such a claim will be the first. But like all of reality TV's most successful stars, including his pal Donald Trump, whose rhetoric about Canada being the fifty-first state he often repeated, O'Leary understands the power of reach and amplification of caricature and how to turn the dial to eleven.
Back in 2017, his bid to lead the Conservative Party of Canada was more about bilingualism than charisma. In fact, he took such a big chunk away from his nemesis Maxime Bernier that he actually contributed to Andrew Scheer's upset victory. If O'Leary had somehow run last year (knowledge of French be damned), it's worth wondering whether he could have successfully directed another eight years of animosity at the Liberals and garnered slightly more support than Pierre Poilievre.
“You either win or you lose,” O'Leary said in October when asked about the latter's prospects as party leader. “I don’t care what the excuse is: you had a mandate, you failed, you were hit.”
Luckily, Safdie and Bronstein write better dialogue than this, and they provide many of the best lines to O'Leary's character, Milton Rockwell—a fabulously wealthy, ethically frustrated designer pen impresario who vacillates between being the benefactor of Marty Mauser and his black beast. And also his romantic rival: Marty sleeps with Milton's movie star wife Kay (Gwyneth Paltrow) behind the latter's back, and his confrontation with the older man is filled with tension over the question of who knows what. Milton's ruthlessness is compounded by his pronounced persecution complex—a provocative mix, given the script's explicit exploration of postwar Jewish-American identity. Safdie's themes about nascent entrepreneurship and the Darwinian metaphysics of the business class suggest nothing more than Shark Tank via Philip Roth; in this equation, O'Leary is something of a scenery-chewing Great White.
He is especially formidable in sadomasochistic settings that demonstrate his talent (so to speak) for public humiliation. Suffice to say, a large portion of the Internet would kill to try to crack Chalamet, just like O'Leary does here. In a ping pong movie, you better believe Safdie gets as much use out of those rackets as possible.
The cognitive dissonance of watching Willy Wonka get spanked by the former CBC News Network anchor is real, as is the quality of O'Leary's performance – whether he's himself or not, he brings something real to the table. Marty Supremewhich would have been a much more harmless film without it. (If Chalamet ends up beating George Clooney for the Best Actor Oscar, he'll have his co-star to thank for making Marty look less of an asshole by comparison.) In the end, Milton gets exactly what's coming to him. It's only fair that O'Leary gets the same treatment. We don't have to sympathize with the devil to give him his due.
