Timothée Chalamet Is Bigger Than a Rollout

This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free. The scene: Mulberry Street in Soho, New York City , Wednesday night. In an event space transformed into an underground ping-pong club, complete with dramatically dark lighting and a thick fog hanging in the air, dozens of table tennis pros battled in a tournament playing out across three rows of tables. The buzz in the room was equally thick, beyond just the aura of competition. The energy surged when director Josh Safdie slid into the event around 11, followed shortly by Marty Supreme 's Odessa A’zion; it was evident everyone at what was officially billed as the Airbnb x Marty Supreme Invitational was waiting to see if and when Marty himself would actually pull up. Sure enough around midnight, the room suddenly fell silent, the DJ stopped spinning a surprisingly fire curated set of mid-aughts rap hits, and all eyes and camera phones shot up to the balcony. And there he was looking down, flanked by his squad of ping-pong henchmen: Mr. Supreme himself. Whether Marty Supreme is the movie of the year is for the film streets to decide. But at this point, the run-up to the movie's Christmas Day release has long since become a cultural event unto itself. It’s hard to find a satisfying word to define what type of time Timothée Chalamet is on lately. Words like “rollout,” “promo run” or “media tour” feel a little reductive. Performance art isn’t quite it, either-we’re hardly in Joaquin territory. Nor is it an outright bucking of traditional promotional expectations-you could hardly say that of a run that’s included a Vogue cover and a slot on The Tonight Show . To put it plainly, Chalamet is, quite simply, connecting dots that have never been connected before, on a path no one after him will easily replicate. It’s been a little over two months since Chalamet strode through Times Square flanked by orange ping-pong-ball-headed goons, an arresting visual that kicked off what’s been one of the most captivating, fun, and at times bizarre media blitzes in some time. The promo tour for Marty Supreme is A24’s biggest promotional push yet (for what’s reportedly the biggest-budget movie in A24 history.) But the most intriguing thing is that all of the outsized ideas and coordinated motion are quite clearly coming from Chalamet himself. We left the standard film-promotion/awards cycle zone four or five stunts ago and crossed over into unprecedented territory. That much became basically indisputable once the actor announced plans to cut up with Druski on the comedian’s Coulda Been Records series. A source close to the situation told me that while A24 has been a supportive and collaborative partner in all of this, most of these concepts and activations are coming from Chalamet's mind, and in some instances, even his pocket. The orange blimp...

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