You couldn’t make this up if you tried: A24 recently set up a Best Supporting Actor campaign for Kevin O’Leary — Mr. Wonderful himself — and his performance in “Marty Supreme.” Does he have a shot at garnering a nomination? Probably not, but he’s still very good in the film.
In “Marty Supreme” O’Leary plays “the richest man in America in 1952.” Gwyneth Paltrow is his unfaithful wife. Timothee Chalamet is the “other man” that come between them. It’s stunt casting, but it works quite well.
Regardless, the “Marty Supreme” Oscar campaign has been wild — and I don’t even need to tackle Chalamet’s gonzo promo tour. However, O’Leary is certainly giving him a run for his money as the most unhinged member of the cast.
The latest O’Leary moment has to do with his gripes about the ending of the film, which — SPOILER ALERT — sees Marty coming off a plane from Japan, where he sabotaged a plan concocted by O’Leary’s character, he runs straight to the hospital, and ends up holding his newborn child, tears streaming down his face, overwhelmed, terrified, euphoric.
“I told them I was really unsatisfied with the ending, for my character to get fucked over like that. This kumbaya ending is absurd,” O’Leary says. (He circles back to this frustration five or six separate times throughout our conversations.) O’Leary feels that Marty “fucked everybody” in his relentless quest for ping pong success, and “why should he not live a life in misery in perpetuity after that?”
O’Leary argued that the consequences shouldn’t stop with Marty alone, but extend to his partner Rachel, portrayed by Odessa A’Zion. He proposed a grim turn in which Rachel would die during childbirth:
Rachel has to die. She has to die in childbirth […] I know that sounds nuts, but to me that would be the right punishment.
This is actually one of the least unhinged things O’Leary has stated in his promo tour. One example, he also revealed that he personally wanted his character, Milton Rockwell, to literally be a vampire who bites Marty by the end of film, and even got dental molds made for fangs during production — though the idea was ultimately dropped.
On a podcast, O’Leary also claimed “Marty Supreme” could have saved “millions of dollars” if scenes with lots of background performers had been done with AI‑generated extras, since they’re “only in the story visually.” He later backtracked on those comments.