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about 16 hours ago

To play a ping pong hustler, Timothée Chalamet wore contact lenses that blurred his eyesight on purpose. Then he put glasses over them to cancel the blur out. When the glasses slipped, he could barely see. He told Theo Von on his podcast that his vision stayed messed up until a day before they talked. The director, Josh Safdie, wanted the character's eyes to look small. So an eye doctor gave Chalamet strong contacts and matching glasses that worked against each other. The real player he based the role on, a 1950s American champion named Marty Reisman, actually needed thick glasses. Chalamet does not. He just wanted the glasses to feel real. The eyesight part came last. The ping pong came first, and it took years. He started in 2018, when he was 22 and the film was only a rumor that nobody had approved yet. He brought a table into the desert while filming Dune. He practiced on the set of Wonka. He kept playing between guitar lessons for the Bob Dylan movie. By the time filming started in New York in 2024, that was six years of training for a role that mostly did not exist yet. Two coaches got him ready at the end. Diego Schaaf, a Swiss coach who once worked on Forrest Gump, and his wife Wei Wang, who used to play for the US Olympic team. They watched him hit for a couple of minutes in June 2024 and decided he was athletic enough to pass as a pro. The crew filled the set with real table tennis champions and about 140 people who were not actors, including the tightrope walker Philippe Petit and the magician Penn Jillette. He played every ping pong shot himself, with no stunt double. Some of the longer rallies were planned out and touched up with computer effects later, but the swing and the footwork and the stance were all him. He won the Golden Globe for it. The Oscar went to Michael B. Jordan for Sinners. The people calling it a snub mostly saw the two hours on screen, not the six years it took to make them look easy.

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