There’s often a common thread among the Oscar nominees who go on to win – and it’s about a lot more than learning the lines.
Rami Malek had singing and piano lessons and worked with a choreographer to transform himself into Freddie Mercury for Bohemian Rhapsody. Natalie Portman went through intensive ballet training for a year for Black Swan.
And according to filmmaker Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro was so dedicated to his boxing training for Raging Bull that he could have gone professional himself.
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Diego Schaaf and Wei Wang work with producers who need help with ping pong scenes in films and TV shows
This year, Timothee Chalamet is the star who really put the hours in when it comes to learning a new skill.
Nominated for best actor at today’s Oscars for his portrayal of the self-absorbed wannabe table tennis champ Marty Mauser in Marty Supreme, such was his commitment to the role he started practising his ping pong back in 2018 – reportedly ensuring a table was with him for filming on other productions including Dune and Wonka.
Ahead of filming for Marty Supreme, Chalamet was paired up with table tennis experts Diego Schaaf and Wei Wang, who coach in Los Angeles and also run Alpha Productions, to help any TV or film producers where ping pong skills are required.
Think Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, or Courteney Cox and Paul Rudd, Monica and Mike, playing in Barbados in Friends.
Schaaf says he was initially asked to get involved by a friend who had been contacted by filmmaker Josh Safdie. “We went to Timothée’s house,” he says. “We spent a few minutes at his house playing and I could tell he can do it. He learns very quickly, he’s physically quite talented, so it was not going to be a problem.”
Schaaf says Chalamet was ‘hyper-focused’ on being the best he could be
By this point in 2024, Chalamet was already a decent player. Schaaf and Wang had to sharpen his skills even further.
“He knew what the strokes had to look like, what the timing had to be, that was critical,” says Schaaf, 72. “He was completely committed from the beginning, and he said, ‘yeah I want to get this right, and we’re going to do what it takes to make it look really good’.”
I got a lesson from Chalamet’s coach – here’s how I got on
I don’t think I’d quite realised just how impressive Timothee Chalamet’s performance is in Marty Supreme until I had a go at playing alongside the professionals myself.
How hard can it be to get a bit of a rally going, I naively thought.
The answer was ‘very’.
What I hadn’t considered was the choreography of it all. Chalamet, of course, wasn’t only being asked to play the game convincingly like a pro – which would have been hard enough – he had the dual challenge of reciting lines whilst, at the same time, placing shots at speed into exact positions.
For continuity they couldn’t just have balls flying off in random directions.
“Aim for the net,” I was advised by Schaaf, “and stop trying to whack it so much”.
The trainer is so skilled he was basically playing off my bat and if I didn’t move much he could make me look good. Chalamet, on the other hand, is seen playing so much throughout the film that he couldn’t cheat his way through it.
While I struggled just to serve, the level of skill he showed is really something else – especially when you break down what we see on screen and the years of effort he spent mastering it.
Marty Supreme isn’t the first example of Chalamet going beyond the basics.
The 30-year-old has been nominated for best actor twice before – for Call Me By Your Name in 2018, and last year for the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.
For Call Me By Your Name, he learned Italian. For A Complete Unknown, he spent years learning guitar and Dylan’s singing style – at the same time as his table tennis.
Katie Spencer tried out her ping pong skills
Schaaf describes him as “hyper-focused” and able to perform at his best when the cameras were rolling.
“Most of us under pressure, perform a little bit less well. He [Chalamet] shares that by the way with Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks missed everything and then as soon as the camera rolls, he wouldn’t miss one.”
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So if the Oscars were to award A for effort, maybe this one should go to Chalamet.
The only trouble is, he’s up against the now favourite Michael B Jordan – the Sinners star who didn’t just play one character but two.
But for Schaaf, there is one winner. Acknowledging the fact he is “super biased”, he says: “He put in the work, he put in work.
“That’s not saying that all the other guys didn’t do the work… I’m sure the other guy worked just as hard and did good. I’m glad I’m not the one who has to distinguish between them. But I saw what [Chalamet] did and what he does is super impressive.”
