Marty Supreme's Gwyneth Paltrow on matching wits with Timothée Chalamet's Marty Mauser: 'Don't f-...

The actress explains how finding her backstory led to a major realization about both of their characters. Marty Supreme's Gwyneth Paltrow on matching wits with Timothée Chalamet's Marty Mauser: 'Don't f with me' The actress explains how finding her backstory led to a major realization about both of their characters. By Gerrad Hall :maxbytes(150000):stripicc()/Gerrad413fcf02541834f43bb26c0de8fe66f66.jpg) Gerrad Hall is an editorial director at , overseeing movie, awards, and music coverage.

The actress explains how finding her backstory led to a major realization about both of their characters.

Marty Supreme's Gwyneth Paltrow on matching wits with Timothée Chalamet's Marty Mauser: 'Don't f--- with me'

The actress explains how finding her backstory led to a major realization about both of their characters.

By Gerrad Hall

Gerrad Hall is an editorial director at **, overseeing movie, awards, and music coverage. He is also host of *The Awardist* podcast, and has cohosted EW's live Oscars, Emmys, SAG, and Grammys red carpet shows. He has appeared on *Good Morning America*, *The Talk*, *Access Hollywood*, *Extra!*, and other talk shows, delivering the latest news on pop culture and entertainment.

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December 23, 2025 11:00 a.m. ET

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Gwyneth Paltrow in 'Marty Supreme'. Credit:

Gwyneth Paltrow has more than 40 movies to her credit and has won an Oscar (among her numerous awards). Still, she admits she was "petrified" stepping back onto a movie set after a seven-year hiatus for director Josh Safdie's *Marty Supreme*.

"Acting is so weird. It's so hard to explain how you do it. It's not a skillset that...it's not a trade that you learn and you get onboarded into how to do something," she says on the latest episode of *The Awardist* podcast. "It's so weird and ephemeral and kind of magic. So I was like, *how did I used to do this? And am I still going to be able to do this? Am I going to be able to access all that stuff and the energy and in the moment?*"

Good news: She was able to, quite successfully. But she also got to ease back in, and in a setting that gives her great comfort, the theater, where her character — New York socialite and former movie star Kay Stone — was also preparing for a comeback.

"It was a scene where [Kay] was on stage rehearsing a play, and the camera was kind of off in the audience. And I learned in the theater, and so I was like, oh, okay, well I'm on stage and I can just sort of feel my way around here," she explains, adding that it helped being surrounded in the scene by David Mamet, who's directing the play within the movie, as well as other theater actors.

Gwyneth Paltrow in 'Marty Supreme'.

It's the first time she's been on a stage in more than two decades. "Unfortunately, I haven't done a play now since before I had a kid, so, like, 2002. But I did a million plays, and it was always like my touchstone. When I want to feel purpose, when I want to feel the real value and art of what we do, I would always go back and do a play. Right after *Shakespeare in Love*, I went back to Williamstown and did a play. That's just been my thing. So it was, for me, a really profoundly kismetic thing that my first day back I was on stage."

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But earlier in the movie, in a hotel lobby, she catches the eye of Timothée Chalamet's Marty Mauser, who uses his confidence (cockiness?) and charms to woo her...eventually into bed. Oh, and she's married to the richest man in America...who could help Marty achieve his goals of worldwide table tennis dominance.

But Paltrow was interested in what got Kay to New York in the first place, to "understand who she was, where she was born, where she had her childhood," she says. She and Safdie built a narrative about Kay that she was from the Midwest, left home, ended up in New York as a showgirl, and "made compromises to her integrity and was a hustler," Paltrow explains. "She did what she needed to do to get what she wanted."

Timothée Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow on the set of 'Marty Supreme'.

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That, though, was an important discovery, because "that was Marty as well, and there was this deep recognition. It's like game recognizes game. 'You're a hustler. I know you. Don't f--- with me, don't try to pull the wool over my eyes.' It was very important for me to feel that parity with him so that when they had scenes together, it was almost like a relief that nobody was really in their essence. And it was clear that it was a transaction and she wanted something from him and he wanted something from her, which was kind of another layer of sad, but also there was the ancillary benefit of her, I think, feeling alive again."

***Check out more from EW's *The Awardist*, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year's best in TV, movies, and more.***

Paltrow says she spent "a lot of time thinking about the fact that she had lost her son in World War II," so she wanted people to see a "hard, cold, glamorous figure" at the beginning, who then gets "some life bellowed into her, and there's moments where all of a sudden she has this girlishness to her, which is so beautiful and painful, and then of course she dares to take this risk to kind of really see if she can reconnect with that part of her that's the real her. And then, of course, her dreams are a bit dashed and it's not a very happy ending for her."

Did Paltrow worry if Kay's fate could be her own? We discuss that, what she discovered about Chalamet as a scene partner and who she likens him to of her past costars, and more. Plus, she reflects on her Oscar win for *Shakespeare in Love* and the controversy made of that movie winning Best Picture over *Saving Private Rya*n, and she looks back on her Emmy-winning performance on *Glee*, and shares her thoughts on what she thinks Pepper Potts has been doing since the events of *Avengers: Endgame*.**

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Source: Actors

Published: December 23, 2025 at 06:38PM on Source: ANDY MAG

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