When I first met Timothée Chalamet, he was convinced that I’d already met him. “Hey John, how are you doing? It’s good to see you again,” he said, with every indication that his feeling was genuine, even if the memory was false.
It was one of those moments of good luck you sometimes get as an interviewer. An area of shared ground that establishes an immediate intimacy, a little advantage which just makes the work less like work, so the interview can become a conversation. And certainly more pleasant than his co-star, who greeted me with: “Hello, cunt.”
But even that has its advantages. After all, conflict is compelling.
Chalamet has been working in movies since 2014, but he’s still only 30. His relationship with Kylie Jenner, part of the Kardashian clan, has taken his celebrity stratospheric, which in some eyes instantly qualifies him for disdain and hopefully cancellation. The noise around him will grow louder now that Marty Supreme has won Chalamet his third nomination for the best actor Oscar; he’s already picked up two other awards for the film, including a Golden Globe.
Chalamet’s career has enjoyed a unique trajectory. Most of his peers have come through franchises and then moved into more interesting work.
Shia LaBeouf had Transformers before being Lars von Trier-ed and bowing at the altar of Abel Ferrara. Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart did Twilight, before creating CVs full of top-quality, challenging movies, collaborating with the best filmmakers of world cinema. Then there are the Hogwarts graduates of Harry Potter, where despite Daniel Radcliffe’s valiant efforts, his cousin Dudley AKA Harry Melling has become the one to watch.
Jennifer Lawrence is perhaps the best analogue, having broken through with Debra Granik’s wonderful Winter’s Bone in 2010 – but even then, within two years, she was tied to two mega-franchises, X-Men and The Hunger Games.
By contrast, after a brief appearance in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), Chalamet’s first lead was in Luca Guadagnino’s arthouse movie Call Me By Your Name (2017) in which he played Elio, a young gay man coming of age in Italy and falling in love with the older Armie Hammer. It was an accomplished performance of maturity – Chalamet is multilingual, speaking fluent French and some Italian – and he showed a vulnerability, especially in the closing shot, where he wordlessly weeps while crouched in front of a crackling fire.
You can see through the window over his shoulder, the snow falling silently while his family set the table for lunch, the clacking of crockery adding to Elio’s sighing. Visions of Gideon by Sufjan Stevens begins to play, and the titles of the film come up. This is heartbreaking, the film says, but life goes on.
From this breakout role, he appeared in a string of high-profile films, starring opposite Steve Carell in Beautiful Boy (2018), playing Saoirse Ronan’s boyfriend in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017) and appearing as Woody Allen in Woody Allen’s Rainy Day in New York (2019). Showing his range, he ruled when David Michod cast him as Henry V in The King (2019).
Only then did he dip into IP world. He danced and sang as Willy Wonka in Wonka (2023). Then Dune Part One (2021) and Two (2024) (which maybe we should just call Dune, right?) gave him his hero role as Paul (Maud Dib) Atriedes.
Although I’m a fan of the Dune films, I began to wonder if Chalamet was getting lost amid the sandworms and the special effects. His performance in Part Two particularly depends on his use of The Voice – his character’s ability to control others by the way he speaks – and on reaction shots from other characters as he talks in the language of the nomadic Fremen people.
Zendaya convinces us he is lovable and Javier Bardem convinces us he is a great leader. With such support, Chalamet makes a slightly milky centre slowly curdle into something interesting, but it is a minor performance in his own film. The third instalment will hopefully stretch him far more – set 15 years after the last film, the boy is now Emperor, a religious leader, and potentially the villain of the piece.
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It is apparent that Chalamet’s ambitions are conscious and vast. When accepting the SAG Award for his role as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown (2024), he said: “I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats.”
This was funny, because at first I found his performance of Dylan frustrating. Within one scene, he could be good and then stilted, captivating and then dull, only coming alive with the karaoke of the performances – and then the music is lifting half the weight. Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez sparkled by comparison.
Then I watched some contemporary footage of the real-life Baez and Dylan talking and I realised the inconsistency of Chalamet’s performance, at once dead-eyed and alert, was an attempt to get at Dylan’s mercurial tenderness and little-boy resilience.
With his relationship with Jenner, Chalamet’s celebrity has become stratospheric. And that celebrity seems incongruous with his claims to artistic ambition and integrity. Is this Claudia Schiffer and David Copperfield’s marriage? A relationship based on magazine spreads, or whatever the equivalent is these days? Or is this a meeting of minds and a genuine love affair? It strikes me that Chalamet would prefer with his ambition to be ranked even in relationship terms with Burton and Taylor rather than Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry.
Passed over at last year’s Oscars for A Complete Unknown – Adrien Brody won instead for The Brutalist – he could well win this time for Marty Supreme. Once more, he has aligned himself with a talent from independent cinema, Josh Safdie who with his brother Benny made Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019). He’s again joined by an extraordinary ensemble class which includes a scene-stealing turn from cult director Abel Ferrara.
His character Marty Mauser is a shifty, amoral/immoral mover and shaker trying to use table tennis as his ticket out of a lifetime in his uncle’s shoe business. He knocks up a neighbour, cheerfully makes Auschwitz jokes to put down his opponent (“it’s okay, I’m a Jew, I can say that”), he’s pure id with a Tourette’s-like urge to say exactly what he shouldn’t and exactly when he shouldn’t. There is no one he won’t exploit and for the vast majority of the film, we’re never really sure how good he even is at table tennis, as that’s the last thing he seems to spend his time doing.
Chalamet takes being obnoxious to heroic levels, almost sublime levels. And it’s not as if – at least for me, many will disagree – he’s as classically Hollywood handsome as others who have trod this thorny path. Not since Paul Newman in Hud (1963), or Robert De Niro in New York, New York (1977) has a Hollywood movie actor decided to go so all-in on unpleasant, and yet somehow still manage to make it riveting.
In comparison to those guys, Chalamet is more like the weasly Dustin Hoffman as Ratzo Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy (1969). Honestly, he ought to win the Oscar for chutzpah.
He has already won that Golden Globe, following which an image began circulating the internet of Chalamet copying the famous Terry O’Neill photo of Faye Dunaway after her 1977 Oscar win, with newspapers at his feet and rocking a silk dressing gown and a pair of high heels. Everyone wants it to be real, so I haven’t checked.
The Dunaway image will secretly delight those who would like to see Timothée Chalamet taken a peg or two; who hope that, as the Daily Mail suggested recently that “his pretty boy, almost androgynous looks and his woke, TikTok-friendly image suggest the Chalamet craze will flicker and die, and his fickle Gen Z audience will soon find a new object for their obsession”. Their main charge so far seems to be that the obnoxious self-belief doesn’t stop when the cameras are off.
The Mail noted “Chalamet, who boasted to Vogue last month that ‘my superpower is my fearlessness – that’s the feedback I’ve gotten since I was a kid’, is displaying the sort of nauseating cockiness, mutter film insiders, that could be his undoing.”
It also mentioned a video interview during the Marty Supreme press junket in which he told a reporter: “This is probably my best performance, you know, and it’s been like seven, eight years that I’ve been handing in really, really committed top-of-the-line performances. And it’s important to say it out loud because the discipline and the work ethic I’m bringing to these things – I don’t want people to take it for granted. I don’t want to take it for granted. This is really some top-level shit.”
The idea that Chalamet might have been in character, or joking – he certainly smirks at the end of the final sentence – seemed to escape the paper. And so did a supposedly ‘leaked’ Zoom call regarding the publicity campaign for Marty Supreme, in which A24 PRs attempt to brief Chalamet, but the star takes over the meeting.
He gives them his ideas about getting his face on breakfast cereal boxes and using “hardcore orange” as the key colour for the posters. “I had a visual artist work on this for six months,” he says, before showing them a square of … well, orange. And when he shares his screen, his wallpaper is a picture of him accepting his SAG award.
Belatedly, it becomes clear that the call is a bit, and a funny one at that. Chalamet is doing a Marty Mauser version of Timothée Chalamet. I wasn’t even sure if the publicity people were in on the joke. They nod and look slightly frightened as Chalamet bullies them into repeating the mantra greatness as he shows them pictures of the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephanie Meyer, author of the Twilight series. “Vampire greatness!” Chalamet enthuses.
On multiple podcasts and red carpets, talk shows and SNL appearances, Chalamet has proven himself to be a canny showman and self-promoter. When (during Graham Norton Show discussion of his lustrous hair) he apparently didn’t know who Samson was, I really didn’t know if he was serious or not, high perhaps or just confused. Again, he could’ve been playing with us – getting us to underestimate him even as he aimed high.
One of the greats? Maybe we’ll get an Oscar speech of similarly sublime uncertainty.
Which brings me back to my meeting with Chalamet and a sudden doubt. Maybe he was fully aware he’d never met me before, but that I’d be flattered and surprised that he assumed we had met, so he’d have the advantage. Had I been Chalameted?
The thing is: if I had, I didn’t really mind. It actually felt quite good.
John Bleasdale’s new novel Connery, about the life of Sean Connery, is published in February by Plumeria
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