Meet Shend, Timothée Chalamet and Josh Safdie’s Latest New York Character

A man’s agitated voice drifts down the hallway of a post-war high-rise complex in Brighton Beach, New York City’s longtime enclave of Eastern European émigrés. “Because I can’t do my best work if my rabbit’s not close!” the man says. “That’s my process! That’s why!” The man—his name is Shend—sits in a swivel chair in a cramped studio apartment and presses a phone to his ear, all the while continuing to soothingly stroke the head of a very large gray rabbit—his name is Otter—that sits in his lap, nose twitching. “Ma!” Shend yells. “Ma! Bring me some water.” A doting woman enters from the kitchen and places a glass of water before Shend, then retreats. “Yeah, I live with my mom,” Shend says into the phone. “Why? Because she’s kind to me.” Shend takes a drink of water. “I’m telling you,” Shend continues, “I’ve never spent this much time on a controller. Either you want it or you don’t.”

Shend, dressed in a Prada tracksuit, turns his gaze to the table behind him, where gaming controllers that he’s customized are spread out before him. He admires his handiwork. And then, at once, Shend’s mood snaps. “There’s not going to be fur on the controller. How do I know? Because my rabbit is nowhere near it.”

Exasperated, Shend ends the call.

“That was great,” says Josh Safdie, who has been standing a few feet away, photographing Shend, as played by Timothée Chalamet. “Let’s pause.”

Leave it to the 30-year-old Chalamet to bring all of himself as an actor, to go all in on his character, even when he’s not making an actual movie. For this W portfolio, he’s in the moment, improvising lines for a guy called Shend whom he and Safdie created. And just who is Shend? He’s a 30-something dreamer-schemer who still lives with his mother, makes pimped-out controllers he hawks from the trunk of his car, is a champion Yu-Gi-Oh! card player, and believes he’s going to make it, even when he’s toiling away in the oblivion of his day job as a doorman.

“I always like imagining alternate paths for Timmy,” says Safdie, who directed the actor in Marty Supreme. The film earned nine Oscar nominations, including best picture, best director, and best actor for Chalamet, who also won his first Golden Globe for the performance. “Shend is inspired by somebody Timmy knew when he was a kid, a guy who made mod controllers and sold them on YouTube. Or at least he was aspiring to do that.”

“Shend is a very New York guy,” Chalamet adds, a character who is “similar” to Marty Mauser, the 1950s Lower East Side Ping-Pong hustler he portrayed in Marty Supreme, “but a more contemporary version of an outsider.” While Shend contains “elements” of Mauser, Chalamet stresses that there’s something fundamentally different about Shend—something best revealed in the scene shot at the local comic-book store where Shend gets his Yu-Gi-Oh! on with strangers. If Mauser was a man entirely out for himself, there’s a part of Shend, who’s almost a man-child, that longs to belong.

“When I was growing up, I was really into cards,” says Chalamet. “I remember being 12 or 13 and going to Midtown Comics to play, and I loved how the game brought all these different classes and races together. For Josh and me, one of the things we like about Shend is the total New York spirit, where you are so concerned you fit in nowhere that you then try to fit in everywhere.”

That “total New York spirit” Chalamet talks about is a shared experience—maybe an energy, too—that unites and inspires the work of both Safdie and Chalamet, two native sons of the city. As a kid, Safdie spent his days bouncing between Queens and Manhattan after his parents split up and settled in different boroughs; Chalamet grew up in Hell’s Kitchen. They first met in 2017 at the afterparty for the premiere of Good Time, a frantic New York City crime thriller that Safdie codirected with his brother, Benny. Chalamet was still months away from breaking out in Call Me by Your Name, and Safdie’s impression of ­ Chalamet was less Next Big Star and more wide-eyed dreamer who seemed to be a bit of an outsider. Still, Safdie sensed there was something palpably special in Chalamet. That night, he dubbed him Timmy Supreme, and the two exchanged numbers with the intention of working together one day. It’s an origin story, and a creative pairing, that now feels as inevitable as that of another generation’s quintessential New York talents, Scorsese and De Niro.

Their collaboration finally began when Safdie’s wife, the producer Sara Rossein, came upon The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler, the 1974 autobiography of table tennis legend Marty Reisman, while she was picking through the dollar bin at a used bookstore. Knowing her husband had been a ­Ping-Pong nut as a kid, she passed it to him, thinking it could make for a good film. Safdie and Chalamet—along with Safdie’s cowriter, Ronald Bronstein—then devoted six years to developing the character of Marty and honing the storyline of a self-centered Ping-Pong prodigy–hustler hell-bent on becoming the world champion.

Shend’s incubation was much, much shorter. “Maybe two or three conversations,” Safdie says. “I think this one is more of an abstract expression,” Chalamet adds.

The depth of Shend’s character, despite the brevity of its inception, is clearly the fruit of all the years Safdie and Chalamet spent laboring together. Watching them on set, adding dimensionality to Shend in real time, you can clearly see that the two of them have now reached a place where trust is not merely present but a fundamental part of their creative process. “What I loved about working on Marty with Josh is he is in this level of mastery where he knows he can be totally reliant on improvisational feelings, or naturalism,” Chalamet explains. “Josh knows if there’s too much fidelity to the script, the magic can be lost. So he wants surprise. He wants you to go off script. And then he’ll restructure the whole nature of a scene, or the dynamic between two characters, around an organic moment. That was one of the most impressive things about working with Josh. He gives you the confidence and the ability to make whatever you want.”

For Safdie, a director who loves to cast nonactors to get performances that are not “performances”—see Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary or the writer Pico Iyer in Marty Supreme—going off script is the only way he knows how to work. “I like to allow room to see what develops. For this shoot, Timmy and I wanted to tell an immigrant story of a striver. All of us, we have these big aspirations, we have our passions. And then we have the thing we actually do with our lives. There’s a real vulnerability in Shend.”

Vulnerability is not necessarily a trait associated with Safdie’s work before Marty Supreme. In movies such as Uncut Gems—the anxiety-inducing thriller in which Adam Sandler plays a fast-talking New York City jeweler and gambling addict—the characters’ main vulnerabilities are being pinched by cops or getting caught by fellow hustlers. But for Safdie, “there’s a latent sadness in dreaming, because you are chasing something. And you’re not sure you’re ever going to actually catch it.”

That’s also true of making movies. “Filmmaking is chasing a life that doesn’t exist,” Safdie continues. “But when you can create life or capture life, or at least how it feels, that’s the beauty of movies. Taking your own experiences and filtering them through another character’s life allows you to understand your own struggles and passions, possibly in a deeper way.”

After eight hours of shooting, Safdie ends the day with a cigarette break outside, in the apartment complex’s parking lot. We stand shivering in the near-zero January windchill as he smokes. “What I love about this shoot is that it functions as a character test. Now I know who this person is.” He pauses. “Maybe now we can go and write a screenplay about him.”

“Really?” I ask.

Safdie smiles a sly smile and then gives a hey-you-never-know shrug.

“What would be the arc of Shend’s life?” I ask.

“He’s at a crossroads. There’s reality, and there’s fantasy. And Shend does not want to go toward reality. He’d rather be lost in fantasy. But I think his childhood passions will eventually give way to the demands of adulthood.”

By now Safdie’s cigarette has gone dark, a casualty of the frigid winds, and he’s searching the faces of passing crew members, wondering who might have a light he can bum. I can tell it’s time to wind this up, so I ask my last question: “What’s with the rabbit?”

“You know, from the day I met Timmy, I’ve just always seen him as a giant Angora rabbit. In fact, the first thing we were going to do together was a short film, a branded-content thing. This was in 2018, and it was going to be him trying to buy an Angora rabbit for his girlfriend. Maybe three days before we were supposed to start shooting, the brand killed the project. In a way, I guess it was good because now Marty is our first movie.”

“You’ve always seen Timothée as an Angora rabbit?”

“Check this out,” Safdie says. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his iPhone, scrolling through his contacts until he gets to Chalamet’s card, then holds his phone up to my face. Beneath “Timothée C.,” in that little round circle where the face of the person you know is supposed to be, there is a headshot of an Angora rabbit, its big round eyes staring out at us.

Hair by Italo Gregorio; makeup by Kyra Panchenko for Beau Domaine at Entesa Global; manicure by Honey for Orly at Exposure NY. Casting by Jennifer Venditti and Michele Mansoor at JV8inc.

Graphic design by Special forces; produced by AP Studio, Inc.; executive producer: Alexis Piqueras; producer: Anneliese Kristedja; director of photography: Ryan Marie Helfant; 1st ad: kate branom; 1st ac: James Daly; 2nd ac: Billy Holman; gaffer: Charles Mcnamara; best boy electric: Meg Schrock; electric: Jenny Kane; key grip: Jimmy Gartland; best boy grip: Justine Berti; grip: James Dooley; vk assistant: Dave Menard; lighting director: Daniel Johnson; photo assistant: Kaitlin Tucker; digital technician: Jarrod Turner; production manager: Hayley Stephon; production coordinator: Nina Su; fashion assistants: Merve Eltemur, Ginger Edmiston, Elizabeth Vianale; production assistants: Cameron Bevans, Ryan Carter, Nabil Elbehri, Jackson Griffin, Alex Gotta, Chris Herity, Thor Karlsen, Ariana Kristedja, Sammi Kugler, Jake Lemonds, Nico Marti, Ben Tillona; hair assistants: Juan Vigoya, Kuki Alrawi; set assistant: Henriette Vittadini; leadman: Jason Lewin; set dresser: Philip D’andria; set pa: Michael Ranghelli; prop stylist assistant: Steve Cascarelli; tailor: Lyndsea LaMarr; background talent: Beket Beisembekov, Alexa Batty, Frank Brannan, Jason Brillon, Thomas Calto, Michael Davitt, Margarita, Tyler Diamond, David Ellner, Gabriel Estrada, Anthony Ferrara, Melanie Futurian, Tyshawn Heath, Hank Kwon, Czselaw, Anna, Brendan Noer, Nicholas Paige, Joshua Paralato, Nancy Shankman, Cooper Simon, Saul Singleton, Andy Song, Chiki Uno, Emmanuel Van Denmark, Simeon Velar; bunnies: All Tame Animals; retouching: D-Touch; color: Electric Theatre Collective; colorist: Jason Wallis; color science: Danyal Kadir; color producer: Alex Carswell; retouch and color: Chris Miggels; special thanks to Bulletproof Comics.