Striving for realism, Timothée Chalamet knew what the scene required. “I’m really getting in the guy’s face and I’m really trying to get him angry with me,” the lead actor recalled recently about the making of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. “I was saying to Josh, ‘He’s not getting angry with me, he’s not getting angry with me.’”
But it turned out the unnamed extra had been paying attention. Chalamet added: “I did another take, and then the guy said, ‘I was just in jail for 30 years. You really don’t want to fuck with me. You don’t want to see me angry.’ I said to Josh, ‘Holy shit, who do you have me opposite, man?’”
The answer was that Safdie had cast a non-actor—one of many who have roles in Marty Supreme, a fictionalized homage to the mid-20th century table tennis player Marty Reisman. Similarly, Paul Thomas Anderson used people with no prior acting experience for his comedy action thriller One Battle After Another.
Safdie and Anderson are following in a long tradition of directors using non-professionals to achieve a level of authenticity based on lived experience and physical presence rather than theatrical technique. It has run the gamut from early Soviet cinema and Italian neorealism to a fleeting appearance by Donald Trump in Home Alone 2.
One Battle After Another has marquee names aplenty—Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Teyana Taylor—but also a striking cameo by James Raterman, a retired Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security Investigations special agent. Raterman was spotted by Anderson after taking part in The Trade, a documentary series about the opioid crisis and human trafficking.
Despite his lack of acting experience, he threw himself wholly into the role of Colonel Danvers. “It’s a job and you have to work at it,” Raterman says by phone from Columbus, Ohio. “The good thing with myself and Paul is he’s so collaborative. He allowed me with the other actors to pull it off the cuff.
“This is one of the best pieces of acting advice that I’ve received and I received it from Mr. Anderson. He said, Jim, when you read the script, don’t pay attention to the words on the page; pay attention to what is it that I need you to do at that particular time. Honestly, I could have probably gone to film school and studied for years and years and maybe got that same piece of advice but, coming from somebody like Paul Thomas Anderson, it put you in a different frame of mind.”
Raterman has nothing but praise for how the professional actors on One Battle After Another welcomed him into the fold. “These are amazing A-list actors that have no problem whatsoever taking you under their wing and treating you like a family member and wanting you to elevate in such a way that the whole project gets elevated.
“You never felt like a stranger, you never feel like an outsider and that started at the top. It started with Paul Thomas Anderson and that’s the way he is so everybody takes his lead. I don’t know if everybody has the same experience but they treated me like a family member from day one until even today. It was an incredible, fun, enjoyable experience. We laughed, we bonded, made some incredible friendships.”
One Battle After Another also features Paul Grimstad, a musician, writer and professor of humanities at Yale University. For years he avoided on-camera work following an early part in his roommate Ronald Bronstein’s indie film Frownland. But then Bronstein passed Grimstad’s name to casting director Cassandra Kulukundis, who immediately saw a natural fit with the character Howard Sommerville.
Grimstad, 52, told the New York Times newspaper that “acting was incredibly fun” and said his years as a university lecturer helped him prepare for the role.The lecturer was ideal preparation. “There is an element of verbal performance in teaching. I’m not talking about over-the-top showmanship, but a certain way of bringing a book to life.”
Grimstad also appears in Marty Supreme, a film primarily set in New York during the early 1950s. The cast includes non-actors such as supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis, former basketball players George Gervin and Tracy McGrady, essayist and novelist Pico Iyer, playwright David Mamet, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, Shark Tank regular Kevin O’Leary, and French high-wire artist Philippe Petit.
Catsimatidis, 77, says: “Josh Safdie says he met me or saw me when I was running for mayor in 2013 and I was what you call a New York character, and he was looking for characters. Being a New York character, I guess I qualify. The lines that I used are things that I do in real life, so I wasn’t acting: that was me.”
He reflects: “I enjoyed it. They worked me until midnight. They did one scene 20 times over. Josh Safdie was a great director. He’s a perfectionist, and I appreciate somebody who wants perfection.”
Petit, who walked a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York in 1974, says: “Many directors are interested in what I would call the freshness of non-actors. Very often, when you take a non-actor instead of a movie star for a movie, that non-actor doesn’t have the training, and some of that could be negative. But I also very much like to have a complete newcomer do something important. It’s sometimes a revelation.”
McGrady, 46, who played for teams including the Orlando Magic and Houston Rockets, adds via email: “I think we bring something real. There’s an authenticity that comes from people who’ve lived a different life and bring that energy naturally. For me, I’m just being myself and bringing my own experience to the role. Sometimes that rawness adds something special (hopefully).”
Gervin, 73, a former San Antonio Spurs player nicknamed the “Iceman,” says: “I met Josh, the director, a few years ago at a card show. We shook hands and spoke, and the next thing I know, I’m getting a call from the studio that Josh would like me to play a role in the movie.”
Gervin plays Lawrence, the owner of a table tennis parlor in midtown Manhattan. He says of Safdie: “He’s very careful in who he picks. He said, ‘When I met George Gervin, George was so warm that he made me feel that he could run an orphanage.’ He knows that I have two charter schools, so I’m around kids all the time and educate them. Did he take a chance? Probably so, but he was in control of what goes in and what goes out, and I’m glad he had that kind of confidence in me.”
Gervin found that filmmaking involves long hours. “I went on set at three in the afternoon and didn’t finish until about four in the morning. I wasn’t used to that kind of endurance, but it only took me a day to do the little part that I had in the movie. You have a different respect for someone like Timothée, who’s the main character, and he was up 12 hours with me. You have to be mentally and physically strong to accomplish what he did. I am truly impressed with what goes into making movies.”
Safdie envisioned Lawrence’s club as a safe place for misfits, which gave casting director Jennifer Venditti the opportunity to study 1950s photographs and tell its story through faces. Her work on Marty Supreme has been shortlisted for the new Oscar category of Best Casting.
Venditti, who began street casting 25 years ago while in the fashion industry, is a longtime collaborator with both Josh Safdie and his filmmaker brother, Benny. She cast former basketball player Kevin Garnett as himself in the Safdies’ 2019 crime thriller Uncut Gems.
She says by phone: “One of our signature things is this idea that we are looking to recreate the cinema of life. Sometimes we…”I love actors and characters, but sometimes within the pool of actors, we can’t find the specific texture needed to build the authenticity of the world we’re exploring. Venditti adds: “We’re always trying to create this alchemy between incredible actors who know where a scene is going and these wild, untrained people who can add texture and mystery because they don’t know where the scene is going. It’s the tension between those two things that creates the excitement in Josh’s films. It’s how we see the world and how we want to see it on screen.”
How do established actors generally respond? “At first, if you’re a very trained actor, it can be alarming—like, wait, this person isn’t following the rules or is talking over me. But Josh is such an amazing director who creates such a safe environment that they trust him, and they then realize that kind of wildness actually enhances their performance.”
The process works both ways, Venditti notes. “The scene partner makes these real people good. Timothée is in every scene, showing up with his dedication, focus, and level of mastery. They become so good because they’re in a scene with someone who demands that of them, and they rise to meet each other.”
The use of non-actors dates back to early Soviet movies like Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October in the 1920s. Italian neorealist films such as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves frequently used non-actors to represent the working class, often dubbing their dialogue with professional voice actors in post-production to ensure clarity and emotional control.
Notable US and UK examples include The Best Years of Our Lives, featuring Harold Russell, a World War II veteran who lost both hands; The Killing Fields with Haing S. Ngor, a Cambodian doctor and genocide survivor with no acting experience; and United 93, in which real flight crew, air traffic controllers, and military personnel played themselves.
Catherine O’Rawe, author of The Non-Professional Actor: Italian Neorealist Cinema and Beyond and a professor of Italian film and culture at the University of Bristol, says: “The non-professional is such an interesting figure. It forces us to look at the question of what acting is, what performance is. Is it just standing up and saying a line? What does good acting bring? Some of the non-actors in postwar Italian films weren’t necessarily what we’d think of as brilliant actors but had an amazing face that the director loved.”
But the practice has also been controversial. Four-year-old Victoire Thivisol won the Best Actress award at the 1996 Venice Film Festival for her role in Ponette, a film about a child who has lost her mother. O’Rawe says: “Her performance was so affecting that she won this award. The director collected it on her behalf and was booed by critics and the audience because it was seen as an affront to the profession: if a four-year-old can do this, then what is the craft of acting worth?”
In 2018, Yalitza Aparicio made her acting debut in Alfonso Cuarón’s drama Roma, earning an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. O’Rawe comments: “She was a total non-actor, and that was a source of great fascination in the press. But sometimes people are a bit uncomfortable that someone with no training can be nominated for awards because, for professional actors, it can feel like, ‘Why have we spent our lives training and studying performance if somebody can just walk off the streets and win an Oscar?'”
However, these accidental stars often find it impossible to build a lasting career. They can be propelled into the spotlight at the Oscars, only to be left without a safety net once the production cycle ends. The industry may fall in love with an “unspoiled” face for a single project, but it rarely offers the infrastructure or ongoing support needed for a sustained career.O’Rawe observes: “These debates have resurfaced at different times, but there is always this underlying tension—both a sense of resentment and the reality that the industry might embrace someone briefly, but it won’t sustain them.
We’ve seen so many cases where actors, after one breakthrough moment—sometimes even after winning an award—find themselves unable to get work because they lack formal training, have no connections in the film industry, or don’t have agents or managers to support them. It can be incredibly difficult to build or maintain a lasting career.”
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs I Wasnt Acting That Was Me Real People Stealing the Spotlight
Q1 What does I wasnt acting that was me even mean
A Its a phrase highlighting when nonactors deliver such authentic powerful performances in movies or TV shows that they become major awards contenders often competing against trained professional actors
Q2 Why is this happening so much this awards season
A A few key reasons 1 Streaming services and studios are investing in bold realitybased stories 2 Casting directors are seeking ultimate authenticity for specific roles 3 Audiences and critics are responding strongly to these raw unfiltered performances
Q3 Isnt it easier to just play yourself Why is it a big deal
A Its often harder Reliving traumatic or intense personal experiences on camera requires immense emotional vulnerability They also lack formal acting training to rely on so theyre navigating a highpressure film set while being completely exposed
Q4 Can you give me some recent examples
A Absolutely Think of Kelsey Juliana or Molly Kearney drawing directly on their nonbinary experience in a comedy role In documentaries subjects like the Ukrainian activists in 20 Days in Mariupol are also performing their reallife crisis
Q5 Whats the main benefit of casting a real person over an actor
A Unmatchable authenticity They bring livedin nuance specific body language and genuine emotion that can be difficult to replicate It also adds a powerful metalayer to the story knowing youre watching the actual person
Q6 What are the potential downsides or problems with this trend
A Ethical concerns are big Are these individuals being properly supported emotionally Are they fairly compensated compared to union actors Theres also a risk of exploitation where someones trauma is used for entertainment without adequate aftercare
Q7 Does this mean professional actors are going to be replaced
