Marty Supreme was — like all of Josh Safdie’s movies — an incredibly stressful viewing experience, and while I’ll probably never watch it again, I can’t get certain parts out of my mind. The shot with the bathtub. Rachel in the phone booth. The honey anecdote. That final needle drop. But one moment sticks out above all else: a throwaway line said to Marty during an argument in the movie’s final moment that comes out of nowhere.
In a recent podcast appearance, Safdie revealed that this originally wasn’t supposed to be just a strange non-sequitur. If he’s to be believed, we could have seen a completely different ending.
Kevin O’Leary’s Marty Supreme character was initially very different.
Near the end of Marty Supreme, Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) goes back on his deal with Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) to purposefully lose an exhibition match against his rival, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi). Rockwell tries to remind him who holds the cards. “I was born in 1601. I'm a vampire. I've been around forever,” he says. “I've met many Marty Mausers over the centuries. Some of them crossed me, some of them weren't straight. They weren't honest. And those are the ones that are still here.”
While it sounds like an exaggeration of his wealth and power, it was apparently meant to be a literal threat to curse Marty with undead life. O’Leary, better known as Shark Tank’s Mr. Wonderful, has long claimed that he improvised this line, and on December 31, 2025, Business Insider reported that O’Leary came up with this backstory. “I have to be a vampire in this movie, and I have to give him eternity in misery,” O'Leary said. He even claimed he had his teeth molded for custom vampire fangs before that part of the scene was cut. Less than a week later, Variety reported seeing a video message O’Leary sent to Safdie where he described Rockwell’s true vampiric identity.
Now, we have Safdie’s side of the story. During an appearance on the A24 podcast alongside Anora’s Sean Baker, Safdie revealed the true intentions for O’Leary’s off-the-cuff backstory. According to Safdie, an initial idea for the movie’s ending involved an epilogue showing an elderly Marty taking his granddaughter to a concert in the 1980s, only to encounter Rockwell again, not a day older, who finally bites him.
“We built the prosthetic for Timmy and everything,” Safdie said. “And Mr. Wonderful shows up behind him and takes a bite out of his neck, and that was the last thing in the movie.”
It’s wild to imagine such an over-the-top supernatural twist in a movie like this, but Marty Supreme is not a very nuanced movie. Still, the ending that actually made it into the film is the perfect bookend for Marty’s wild ride, no fangs needed.
