Quiet Dominance

Tyler’s standout performance in Josh Safdie’s film, followed by a surprise freestyle, capped a year defined by creative control and surprising range.

Last year, Tyler, the Creator popped up in the comments under an Instagram post from Steve Lacy, who was dealing with the frustration of fans constantly asking for new music. 

“I feel you. shit is annoying especially when I never said out my mouth an album was coming,” Tyler wrote. “I wanna be an actress lmfao.” At the time, it read like a throwaway joke, but it’s since come to feel like a mission statement. Within the span of a year, he’s managed to do both exceptionally well, dropping the critically-acclaimed Chromakopia only a few days after his comment on Lacy’s post, following it up with the surprise release of Don’t Tap The Glass this summer and, now, his show-stealing performance in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, where he more than holds his own among an ensemble cast featuring the likes of Timothee Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow. 

In the film, Tyler, the Creator — credited under his full name, Tyler Okonma — plays Wally, a sharp-witted taxi driver who, like Chalamet’s Marty Mauser, is a ping-pong obsessive. The pair goes out and hustles other players with a cunning ruse that relies on the era’s racial and ethnic divisions. Wally somewhat anachronistically glides through the all-white club, able to garner sympathy from other players with a story about a rider skipping out on the fare and attacking him. The role leans into Tyler’s natural charisma and timing, positioning Wally as both a mirror and a counterweight to Marty’s ambition. The ambient sense of racialized danger creates a subtle, unnerving backdrop that fits squarely into Safdie’s signature sense of dramatic tension.  Wally and Marty eventually dupe a handful of white players into betting on their elaborate charade of a match, inadvertently setting off one of the film’s central plot points. 

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As the movie’s sole Black character, Wally brushes up against familiar Hollywood tropes, notably the Magical Negro figure whose primary function is to illuminate something for a white protagonist. While the script offers a disappointing lack of depth for Wally’s interior life, Tyler’s performance pushes against that limitation, offering a kind of magnetism that rivals Chalamet’s career-defining turn. Mind you, this is Tyler’s first appearance in a feature film. More impressive is that he apparently freestyled much of his performance. “I didn’t try to memorize no lines or nothing — I’m not even going to try to put that weight or pressure on me because then that’ll fuck the scene up,” he recently told Vanity Fair.

It fits with Tyler’s ethos as a performer, able to transform at a moment’s notice. “It’s been so many shows that I’ve done that were incredible, some of my best performances, and like, bro, I’m asleep nine minutes before,” he continued. His performance in solidifies something that’s been true for his entire career. Going back to the early days of Odd Future, when Tyler’s often self-directed music videos would capture just as much attention as the music — or, in the case of “Yonkers,” attention — his newfound path as an actor is a natural progression.