The one thing Benny Safdie hates the most about actors: “It destroys me”

Posted On January 1, 2026January 1, 2026

2025 was probably the biggest yet in the lives of the Safdie brothers. Not only did Josh Safdie direct the Oscar-tipped table tennis movie Marty Supreme, but Benny Safdie came out with The Smashing Machine, likely to also be in the mix next March when the time comes around to start handing out golden statues. 

One of those statuettes might well go to Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson for his performance in the younger Safdie brother’s MMA movie, and Safdie himself knows a bit about acting, having appeared in Christopher Nolan’s multi-award-winning Oppenheimer in 2023, the Star Wars spin-off Obi-Wan Kenobi and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza.

It’s probably not a shock then to know that he has a few pet hates when it comes to the actors in his movies, as he told GQ: “I hate it when people don’t eat (on camera). It destroys me.” In fact, so dedicated to this is he that when appearing in a dinner scene in Anderson’s 2021 film, he tried to eat food in every take, adding: “I don’t know how many tiramisus I ate, but it must have been 30.”

He says he did the same thing in the show The Curse that he made with Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone, too, stating: “60 chips in one take, and we must have had nine takes…”

By the way, food aside, if you haven’t seen the two movies that really first carried the stamp of the Safdie brothers’ mark of quality, 2017’s Good Time and 2019’s Uncut Gems, then watching them should definitely be high up on your 2026 to-do list. The first film is a thrilling Robert Pattinson effort, while the latter is Adam Sandler in a career-high performance and one of the most unrelentingly tense movies since Kathryn Bigelow’s last one.

The brothers decided to work on separate projects after that, Josh doing Marty Supreme and an Adam Sandler Netflix special, but after nearly seven years, it seems they may be reuniting, again with Sandler on an as-yet-untitled movie. 

On why they felt it was important to take a break from directing films together, Benny told Esquire: “We had started out making movies separately, in college. And then we were always working towards something, and when we reached that place, it was almost like, ‘Oh, well, what now?’ Then it was like, ‘I’m interested in this,’ and ‘I’m interested in this,’ and then you want to figure that out. It just felt like a continuation of a process.”

Coming soon, Safdie will again be putting his actor’s hat (or helmet) on in another Christopher Nolan film, this time the action epic The Odyssey, along with seemingly every other name actor in Hollywood that isn’t doing Avengers Doomsday.

He’ll also lend his voice to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie as Bowser Jr in the sequel to the Chris Pratt-starring hit from 2023. Luckily, that’s all computer animation, so he won’t have to worry about any of the actors refusing to eat on camera.

And he isn’t done directing either, taking charge of the bizarre-sounding Lizard Music, also starring The Smashing Machine’s Dwayne Johnson in the tale of a young boy who witnesses a band of lizard musicians on late-night TV and attempts to track them down.

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