Marty Supreme almost ended with Kevin O’Leary doing what?
They had the teeth ready to go and everything
If you saw Marty Supreme and left the theatre thinking, I need to procure some fan-fiction about this ambitious young man, a recent episode of A24’s podcast provides something sort of like that.
As noted by Variety, the film’s director and co-writer Josh Safdie told host Sean Baker that an early draft of the movie had things ending very differently for Timothée Chalamet’s character.
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“He turns that shoe store into the most successful shop on Orchard Street. He changes it to Marty Mauser’s Shoes. Franchises, franchises again, leaves New York state, becomes a very rich man,” Safdie explained of an alternate ending that was ultimately cut. “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.”
What could be more painful than Marty Mauser all grown up, filthy rich and pining for ping-pong?
Enter Kevin O’Leary, whose character was supposed to bite Marty in the neck, calling back to his earlier “I’m a vampire” line. That was going to be the very last scene, and Safdie went so far as to prepare digital teeth.
The A24 executives couldn’t believe it either, asking Safdie, “This is a mistake, right?”
The one person who did like the blood-sucking option was, unsurprisingly, O’Leary himself. “I know that sounds nuts, but to me that would be the right punishment,” said the Shark Tank star, who was generally displeased with the ending.
According to Variety, O’Leary told Safdie that Odessa A’zion’s character should “die in childbirth” as retribution for Marty’s selfishness. Safdie reportedly considered O’Leary’s note but decided it was too “sick.”
Related:How Shark Tank crank Kevin O’Leary broke into Hollywood with Marty Supreme
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
