How a travel writer became Timothée Chalamet's ping-pong nemesis

For Pico Iyer, making his acting debut in the hit movie Marty Supreme was the latest journey in a life full of unexpected voyages

- PICO IYER

"I'M GUESSING YOU don't get angry very often," the film director Josh Safdie was saying to me on Zoom, about 18 months ago. We'd never met or spoken, but he'd seen me onscreen. "That's probably true," I replied. I was sitting in a tiny hotel room in Paris on a warm summer evening.

"Great! Well, I want you to be angry at every moment. Enraged! You're going to get Timmy Chalamet in a headlock."

This wasn't what is often said to a retiring writer in his 60s who lives in an obscure suburb in Japan. But only a few days after an email arrived in July 2024 - the subject line read: "Pico Iyer/Feature Film Opportunity" - I was being contacted by a moviemaker famous for casting nonactors. "I've never acted in my life," I protested, even as I remembered how the professional basketball player Kevin Garnett shone in Josh's Uncut Gems. "Not even in high school. Not in a student movie."

Josh had no doubt of that. But he'd watched a TED Talk I'd delivered on ping-pong as a guide to life and come away thinking that no one might be better suited to playing a humourless, uptight, domineering British table tennis official in 1952, trying to contain a feisty and impudent upstart from New York based on the ping-pong legend Marty Reisman.

I can't say he was wrong. My talk had explained how, playing ping-pong in Japan three times a week for 21 years, I've seen the sport I first learned in the United States completely upended. We only ever play doubles here in Nara, and we change partners every five minutes, using playing cards to choose teams at random. This means that nobody ever loses - or wins - for long, all the more so since we engage in best-of-two games, and matches often end in a tie.

Nothing could be more different from the furious, flamboyant, winner-takes-all spirit of Reisman, whose wild individualism I'd heard about while playing the sport as a boy.