‘I wasn’t acting: that was me’: how non-actors took over Oscar season

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 fictionalised 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.