Josh Safdie told Sean Baker during a recent episode of the A24 Podcast that an early draft of “Marty Supreme” took Timotheé Chalamet’s titular ping-pong star all the way through the late ‘80s, where he becomes a successful business owner. However, in the film’s final moment, Milton Rockwell, played by Kevin O’Leary, would take “a bite out of his neck,” paying off Rockwell’s “I’m a vampire” line earlier in the third act.
“He turns that [shoe store] into the most successful shop on Orchard Street. He changes it to Marty Mauser’s Shoes,” Safdie said of the scraped ending. “Franchises, franchises again, leaves New York State, becomes a very rich man. All the metrics of success are there. His family grows, he leaves the city, has this beautiful house, and it ends with him at a concert for Tears for Fears with his granddaughter. They’re 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 this success, but he’s not doing the thing that he believed he was born on the planet to do.”
Safdie then dropped the punchline, “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. And he hasn’t aged.”
Safdie recalled that when A24 read the ending, studio execs asked him, “’This is a mistake, right?’”
O’Leary recently told Variety that he was all for the vampiric payoff, sharing that Safdie “went as far as to make digital teeth.” He added, “I know that sounds nuts, but to me that would be the right punishment.”
The “Shark Tank” star shared that he was “really unsatisfied” with the conclusion of “Marty Supreme,” given that his character gets “fucked over” while Marty and his family have a “kumbaya ending.” O’Leary suggested Odessa A’Zion’s Rachel had to “die in childbirth” at the end as punishment for Marty Mauser’s selfishness. Safdie allegedly considered the change but ultimately deemed it too “sick.”