Meet Marty Supreme director Josh Safdie’s famous brother Benny, plus their controversial split as collaborators

Benny was born on February 24, 1986, just two years after Josh. He and his brother were raised in New York, splitting time between Queens, where their dad lived, and Manhattan, with their mom.

Like his big brother, Benny studied at the Boston University College of Communication, graduating in 2008.

In 2009, Benny and Josh’s first feature film premiered. The two co-wrote, directed, and edited Daddy Longlegs together. Four years later, in 2013, their second film, Lenny Cooke, a documentary about the 2001 top ranked high school basketball player, premiered. 

The next year, at the 71st Venice International Film Festival, the third Safdie brother film, Heaven Knows What, premiered. In 2016, Benny and Josh directed Robert Pattinson in Good Time. Benny also starred in the film about a criminal who tries to free his developmentally disabled brother. For his work on the film, Benny received an Independent Spirit Award nomination.

The most well known Safdie brother film is of course Uncut Gems, starring Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, and Julia Fox. The anxiety-inducing film was critically received, with the brothers winning the Independent Spirit Award for Best Director.

In their acceptance speech, Benny and Josh jokingly spoke over each other, but ended by saying “I love you” to each other.

While he is known for his work behind the camera, Benny is also a successful actor. Besides acting alongside Robert Pattinson, he starred in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Licorice Pizza and the 2023 film, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Of his role as a Jewish father to a tween girl, Benny told NPR: “There was something really cathartic about trying to put myself in a position of unconditional love with no understanding of what the other person was going through.”

That same year, he starred in Oppenheimer as physicist and father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller. Benny leaned into his eyebrows for the role, telling Vulture: “Teller had the best eyebrows. Every once in a while I have a straggler that I’ll just pluck out, ’cause it looks a little too crazy. But Chris [Nolan] said, ‘Don’t do that. Let’s just let it go crazy.’ I had the most insane eyebrows for months and months, and you just had to brush them out and then they shined in all their glory.”

In July 2023, Benny opened up to GQ about his split from his brother Josh. “It just felt like, okay, there’s things that I want to explore that don’t necessarily align right now with Josh,” the director explained. “So it’s a divide and conquer mentality.”

He continued: “He wants to tell this story, he can go and do that. I’m going to go and do a couple of other things. It seems like a natural progression for how things have happened.”

A year later, Benny spoke about the split again, telling Variety: “I will direct on my own, and I will explore things that I want to explore. I want that freedom right now in my life.” While fans of the Safdie brothers were shocked by their split, Benny knew it was inevitable.

“We had started out making movies separately, in college,” he told Empire in August 2025. “And then we were always working towards something, and when we reached that place it was almost like, ‘Oh, well, what now?'”

Since then, both Josh and Benny have made sure to clarify, there is no beef and no friction between them.

While Josh directed Marty Supreme, Benny worked on Smashing Machine with Dwayne The Rock Johnson and Emily Blunt. The 2025 sports drama film about former amateur wrestler and MMA fighter Mark Kerr received critical success – Benny won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival. But it was snubbed in the bigger award shows.