‘I Wasn’t Acting: This Is Me’: How Non-Actors Take Over Oscar Season | Oscars 2026

STimothée Chalamet strove for realism, and he knew what the scene required. “I’m really confronting the guy and really trying to make him mad at me,” the lead actor recently said about the making of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. “I was telling Josh, ‘He doesn’t get mad at me, he doesn’t get mad at me.’”

But it turns out the unnamed extra was paying attention. “I took another shot,” Chalamet added, “and then the guy said, ‘I’ve been in prison for 30 years.’” You really don’t want to fuck me. You don’t want to see me angry.’ I said to Josh, ‘Oh my God, who made me meet you, man?’

The answer was that Safdie had cast a non-actor — one of many roles in Marty Supreme, a fictionalized tribute to mid-20th-century table tennis player Marty Raisman. Likewise, Paul Thomas Anderson used people with no prior acting experience in his comedy-thriller Battle After Battle.

Safdie and Anderson follow a long tradition of directors using non-professionals to achieve a level of authenticity that relies on lived experience and physical presence rather than theatrical technique. It ran the gamut from early Soviet cinema and Italian neo-realism to a fleeting appearance by Donald Trump in Home Alone 2.

There are plenty of big names in “Battle After Battle” — Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor — but there’s also a cameo appearance by James Ratterman, a retired Special Agent in the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security Investigations. Anderson discovered Ratterman after participating in Trade, a documentary series about the opioid crisis and human trafficking.

Despite his lack of acting experience, he threw himself completely into the role of Colonel Danvers. “It’s a job and you have to work at it,” Ratterman says by phone from Columbus, Ohio.. “The good thing between me and Paul is that he is very cooperative. He allowed me and the other actors to take it off the table.

“That’s some of the best acting advice I’ve ever received and I received it from Mr. Anderson. He said to me, ‘Jim, when you’re reading a script, don’t pay attention to the words on the page; pay attention to what I want you to do at that particular time.’ Honestly, I probably could have gone to film school and studied for years and years and probably gotten the same advice, but, coming from someone like Paul Thomas Anderson, it puts you in a different frame of mind.”

Ratterman has nothing but praise for the way the professional cast of One Battle After Another welcomed him into the fold. “These are amazing actors who have no problem at all taking you under their wing and treating you like a family member and want you to elevate in a way that elevates the entire project.

“You never felt like an outsider, you never felt like an outsider, and it started at the top. It started with Paul Thomas Anderson and that’s the way everyone does it. I don’t know if everyone had the same experience but they treated me like a family member from day one until today. It was an amazing, fun, fun experience. We laughed, we bonded, we made some great friendships.”

“Battle After Battle” also features Paul Grimstad, a musician, writer, and professor of humanities at Yale University. For years he avoided working in front of the camera after an early role in his roommate Ronald Bronstein’s indie film Frownland. But then Bronstein passed Grimstad’s name to director Cassandra Kouloconidis, who immediately saw a natural fit for Howard Somerville’s character.

Grimstad, 52, told the New York Times that “acting was incredibly fun” and said his years as a university lecturer were perfect preparation. “There is an element of verbal performance in teaching. I am not talking about showmanship, but about a certain way of bringing the book to life.”

Grimstad also appears in Marty Supreme, set primarily in New York during the early 1950s, along with non-actors including supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis, former basketball players George Gervin and Tracy McGrady, an essayist and novelist. Pico Iyer, playwright David Mamet, costume designer Isaac Mizrahi, Shark Tank regular Kevin O’Leary, and French artist Philippe Petit.

“Josh Safdie says he met me or saw me when I was running for mayor in 2013, and I was what you call a New Yorker and he was looking for characters,” says Catsimatidis, 77. “Being a New Yorker, I think I qualified. The phrases I used were things I do in real life, so I wasn’t acting: it was me.”

He reflects: “I enjoyed it. They worked with me until midnight. They did one scene more than 20 times. Josh Safdie was a great director. He’s a perfectionist and I appreciate a person who wants perfection.”

“A lot of directors are interested in what I would call the freshness of non-actors,” says Beatty, who in 1974 walked between the Twin Towers in New York on a tightrope. “A lot of times, when you cast a non-actor instead of a movie star for a movie, that non-actor doesn’t have the training and some of that can be a negative, but I also very much like to have a completely newcomer to do something important. It’s sometimes a revelation.”

McGrady, 46, who played for teams including the Orlando Magic and Houston Rockets, adds via email: “I think we bring something real to the table. There’s an authenticity that comes from people who have lived different lives and bring that energy naturally. For me, I’m just being myself and bringing my own experience to the role. Sometimes that rawness adds something special (I hope).”

“I met Josh, the director, a few years ago at a card show, and we shook hands and talked and the next thing I know, I got a call from the studio that Josh would like me to play a part in the movie,” says Gervin, 73, a former San Antonio Spurs player nicknamed “The Iceman.”“

Gervin plays Lawrence, the owner of a table tennis hall in downtown Manhattan. He says of Safdie: “He’s very careful about who he picks. He said, ‘When I met George Gervin, George was so friendly that he made me feel like he could run an orphanage. He knows I have two independent schools, so I’m around the kids all the time teaching them. Did he take a chance? Maybe so but he was in control of what came in and what went out and I’m glad he had that kind of confidence in me.’

Gervin found that filmmaking required long hours. “I went to the set at three in the afternoon and didn’t finish until about four in the morning. I wasn’t used to that kind of endurance but it only took one day to do the small role I had in the film. You have a different respect for someone like Timothy, who is the main character and he was up for 12 hours with me. You have to be mentally and physically strong to accomplish what he did. I really admire what happens in filmmaking.”

Safdie envisioned the Lawrence Club as a safe place for misfits, and it was a gift to casting director Jennifer Venditti to study images of the 1950s and tell her story through faces. Her work in Marty Supreme landed her on the shortlist for the new Oscar category for Best Ensemble Cast.

Venditti, who began casting on the streets 25 years ago while working in the fashion industry, is a longtime collaborator with both Josh Safdie and his director brother Benny. She cast former basketball player Kevin Garnett as himself in the Safdies’ 2019 crime thriller Uncut Gems.

“One of our signature things is the idea that we’re looking to recreate the cinema of life,” she says over the phone. “Sometimes we love actors and characters, but sometimes, in an ensemble cast, we can’t find the texture needed to build the authenticity of the world we’re exploring.”“.

“We’re always trying to create this chemistry between these amazing actors who know where the scenes are going and then these wild people who can add texture and mystery because they don’t know where the scene is going,” Venditti adds, “and the tension between those two things is what creates the excitement in Josh’s films. It’s the way we see the world and how we want to see it on screen.”

How do established actors generally respond? “At first, if you’re a very trained actor, it can be annoying in the sense of wait, this person isn’t following the rules or talking to me. But Josh is an amazing director who creates such a safe environment, they trust him and then realize that this kind of brutality brings to their performances.

Vendetti points out that the process works both ways. “A scene partner makes these real people good. Timothy shows up in every scene with his dedication, focus and level of mastery. They’re so good because they’re in a scene with someone who asks them to and then they get up to meet each other.”

The use of non-actors dates back to early Soviet films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October of the 1920s. Italian neorealist films, such as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, often used non-actors to represent the working class and used post-production dubbing by professional voice actors to ensure clear dialogue and emotional control.

Notable examples in the US and UK include The Best Years of Our Lives, featuring Harold Russell, a World War II veteran who lost both hands; “The Killing Fields” with Haing S. Ngor, a Cambodian doctor and genocide survivor with no acting experience; and United 93, where real flight crew, air traffic controllers and military personnel played their part.

“The non-professional actor is an interesting figure,” says Catherine Oraway, author of “The Non-Professional Actor: Italian Vérité Cinema and Beyond” and professor of Italian cinema and culture at the University of Bristol in Britain. “He forces us to look at the question of what is acting, what is performance? Is it just standing up and saying a line? What does good acting bring? Some of the non-actors, for example, in the films of post-war Italy were not necessarily what we would consider great actors but had a striking face that the director loved.”

But this practice has also been controversial. Four-year-old Victoire Thivisole won the Best Actress award at the 1996 Venice Film Festival for her role in Bonnet, about a child who loses her mother. “The performance was so moving that she won this award and the director accepted it on her behalf and was booed by critics and audiences because it is seen as an insult to the profession: if a four-year-old can do this, what is the value of the craft of acting?” says Orawe.

In 2018, Yalitza Aparicio made her acting debut in Alfonso Cuarón’s drama film “Roma”, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. O’Rawe commented: “She was a complete non-actor and that was a source of great fascination among the press, but sometimes people feel a little uneasy about the possibility of someone who has no training being nominated for awards, because for professional actors it can mean, well, why did we spend our lives training and doing all this studying for performances if someone can come off the streets and win an Oscar?”

But these occasional stars often find it impossible to build a lasting career. They can be thrust into the spotlight at the Oscars only to be left without a safety net once the production cycle is over. The industry may fall in love with the “unspoiled” face of a single project, but it rarely provides the infrastructure needed to turn a singular moment of authenticity into a career.

“These discussions have gone on and come back at different times, but there’s always an undercurrent of resentment and also that the industry might once have loved these people but won’t support them,” Oraway says.

“There are many cases of these actors who after one big moment, and sometimes even winning an award, will find that they can’t get jobs because they’re not trained, they don’t have any connections in the film industry or they don’t have any agents or managers or people looking after them. It can be very difficult to build or maintain a career.”“.