The director of Marty Supreme reveals that Timothée Chalamet’s table tennis movie originally ended with a vampire twist. Marty Supreme is another chaotic entry from Uncut Gems co-director Josh Safdie, which follows the relentlessly determined Marty Mauser (Chalamet), who endeavors to become an international tennis star, and is likely to be a 2026 Best Picture nominee.
But as crazy as the movie is, Safdie revealed in a discussion on the A24 podcast that Marty Supreme could have ended with Kevin O’Leary’s character being revealed to be a vampire, as he attacks an older Marty. The alternate ending would have seen the rest of Marty’s life go by, and when he is attending a Tears for Fears concert with his granddaughter in the 1980s, “Mr. Wonderful” shows up.
“You’re 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 image,” said Safdie to director Sean Baker (Anora). O’Leary’s character, in a strict sense, is businessman Milton Rockwell, the husband of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Kay Stone, an actress who is having an affair with Marty.
Rockwell does, at one point in the movie, retort to Marty: “I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire. I’ve been around forever. I’ve met many Marty Mausers over the centuries.” Safdie also shared in his interview that O’Leary came up with this line when they and co-writer Ronald Bronstein were trying to figure out how Rockwell would respond to Marty espousing his own worldview.
“And I remember A24,” Safdie said, about the cut ending, “and everyone were like, ‘This is a mistake, right?’” But the filmmaker also explained how this twist actually played into the movie’s themes, saying: “We had an idea at one point, which kind of speaks to the music in the film, the music in the movie is this built-in feeling of, first of all, the timelessness of it, what anachronism does, the past hunting the future, the future hunting the past.“
Safdie further said about the cut final scene: “They’re great seats [at the concert], up front, and he’s [Marty] watching it, and he’s thinking about “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and youth and what does it mean, and he has this success, but he’s not doing the thing that he believed he was born on the planet to do. He has all this great stuff around, he has these great things around him.“
The real ending of Marty Supreme sees Marty, having beaten the table tennis world champion in an informal but publicized match, returning home to see Rachel (Odessa A’zion), whom he abandoned at the hospital to go to Japan while she was wounded and in labor. The last shot is of him crying when he sees the baby, ready to accept the child as his own.
Meanwhile, Kay has failed to make her comeback when her new play receives a terrible review, and Rockwell has no further interest in Marty after he derailed their plan, which was for Marty to intentionally lose his match in Japan. Rockwell refuses to bring Marty back to the U.S., and he gets a ride home with the American soldiers who were also at the event.
Marty Supreme has a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and is seeing a decent number of major awards nominations, so the conclusion Safdie and his team went with worked out. But the alternate vampire ending still ties into elements that are still present in the movie.
- Release Date
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December 19, 2025
- Runtime
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150 minutes
- Director
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Josh Safdie
