‘Marty Supreme’ Casting Director Jennifer Venditti – Interview

The scale of “Marty Supreme” matches the ambition of its protagonist, Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet). While Mauser’s manic quest to become the face of table tennis as a world champion takes him everywhere from the bowels of the Lower East Side to Japan (and back again), the challenge for casting director Jennifer Venditti in her seventh collaboration with a Safdie brother, and fourth with director Josh Safdie, was to find over 150 roles that would fit the early ’50s time period and specific cultural milieus that Marty runs headlong through.

To steal the wisdom of “Ratatouille,” maybe not everyone can act, but great actors can come from anywhere. Venditti’s documentary background and extensive exploration of street photography from the ’50s both prompted her to look outside the pipeline of established actors for core roles within the film. “It’s not that I don’t love actors, too,” Venditti told IndieWire. “When non-actors come into play (for casting consideration), it’s when they have a lived experience that can inform the character in a way that the writers maybe didn’t think of, or that they can add depth to the part.”

Venditti cited Kevin O’Leary, who plays pen mogul Milton Rockwell in the film, as a great example of this. Most folks would be more familiar with O’Leary’s work playing himself in front of hundreds of hopeful entrepreneurs as one of the hosts of “Shark Tank.” It would be what a modern-day version of Milton is doing, so O’Leary’s particular lived experience adds an enticing level of authenticity to the role, even while Safdie helps him to shape his persona and mannerisms to fit the needs of the story and its period worldbuilding. “I’m lucky enough to work with a director who is super skilled and doesn’t mind having to help people get there,” Venditti said.

With O’Leary, Venditti’s team didn’t have much of a chance to work with him, so it was really on Safdie and co-screenwriter Ronald Bronstein to have the conversations that would help shape his performance. But for a character like Dion (Luke Manley), who also has to go toe-to-toe with Chalamet, Venditti and her team were instrumental in finding the right, and unexpected, person for the part. “We saw a lot of people for it. Actors and non-actors, and Luke is not an actor, but he came in and I took him through the process. We had many stages of what I do (with non-actors), and he passed every phase of it with flying colors,” Venditti said. “So a lot of times, I’m prepping the person for Josh before they get onto the set.”

Venditti starts this process with a documentary-style interview, just to get a sense of the person and their life, maybe if they have anything that overlaps or resonates with a character. “It doesn’t have to be specific, but the energetics of their life, maybe they have similar things to the characters on the page — it’s kind of like being a detective, a little bit, finding out if there’s anything in this person’s personality that would be interesting to bring to a character,” Venditti said.

From there, Venditti’s goal is to create a safe environment for folks to do a little bit of improv. “First of all, to be taken from your life, and brought into this situation where these people are gonna judge you, or they want you to be something — we never want to think of it like we’re asking you to perform, you know? We’re asking you to come into this environment and have an experience and bring yourself to it. So I really try to make it an environment that feels safe,” Venditti said. “I’ll come up with a scene or an improv scenario that (has) similar energetics of whatever one of the scenes might be in the movie — if it’s hostile, or confused, or something — and then I have an actor there that’s good at improv, so they have a great sparring partner.”

While the experienced improviser can lead a scene or game and give someone scenarios to play with, Venditti is fascinated by how people without acting training can respond to it — and often it’s more fun than your average 201 showcase. “Oh my God, if these walls could talk, in my office. Like, on ‘Uncut Gems’ it was insane. My associate basically almost got murdered so many times. Because people get so into it and because they’re not actors, they don’t know any of the rules. So it’s like, ‘Can I touch this?’ you know? They just go for it,” Venditti said.

If a performer can be playful, in the moment, and really bring themselves to an acting scenario, then from there, Venditti and her team will give them lines to learn and progress them onto further stages of the audition process. “But the idea is to keep reinforcing that they’re there because of them, not because we want them to be someone else. We want them to bring themselves to this role. We want them to play, but we don’t want them to become someone else,” Venditti said.

Venditti’s background is documentary, and her facility with casting and working with non-actors, but her work across the board comes out of an insatiable interest in people. She’d auditioned Odessa A’zion, who plays Rachel Mizler, very much Marty’s sparring partner and also his baby mama, for something wildly different years before “Marty Supreme,” but always remembered her.

“In the movie, you see (her as) this hustler, and she’s this vulnerable sweet girl that you feel for, and she also has this spunk to her where she’s resilient, she’s quick. They’re mirrors of each other, but she is a shapeshifter in that way where you’re like, ‘Oh, she’s a little shit,’ but you also care about her,” Venditti said. “For Rachel, it wasn’t about her looks, it was about the spirit of this character and the life she’d lived and what she’s been through and what her resilience and her tenacity is. And I think (A’zion) just had it all. Odessa has this authentic, original quality about herself (and) a real connection to the spectrum of who she is and the capacity to feel a lot. She just — it’s who she is.”

That is what makes the casting of “Marty Supreme” so staggering. Every one of the 150-plus roles is exactly who these people are.

An A24 release, “Marty Supreme” opens in theaters on December 25.