A year later, Timothee Chalamet is again turning heads
A YEAR AFTER HIS breakthrough performance in Call Me By Your Name, Timothee Chalamet is again the toast of the fall film festival circuit. Though there were few doubters after Chalamet became the youngest best-actor Oscar nominee in almost 80 years, the young actor’s performance in the father-son addiction drama Beautiful Boy has resolutely confirmed Chalamet as one of the most talented actors of his generation.
In the film, which made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, Chalamet plays Nic Sheff, the young son of David Sheff (Steve Carell).
In scenes that toggle between the father’s happier memories with his son and the crushing cycles of rehab and relapse that come later, Beautiful Boy is an unusually realistic depiction of drug addiction, as seen through the prism of a family.
Chalamet’s layered performance runs from a boyish, curious kid to a young man in existential freefall. It’s returned him to the top of Oscar predictions lists, only this time slotted in among supporting-actor favourites.
Some have joked that if Chalamet, who was trumped in March by Gary Oldman, were to win, it would effectively be like a lifetime achievement award for the 22-year-old.
“It’s something I heard Armie (Hammer) say a number of times last year: The cake of the experience is making it, from a personal standpoint,” Chalamet said in an interview.
“It’s working with artists you admire and telling a story of great importance. This story and this film feel very urgent. People will take from it what they will.”
The film, directed by Felix Van Groeningen, is based on memoirs by both Sheffs: David’s Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction and Nic’s Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines. Both attended the Toronto premiere, receiving loud rounds of applause when they took the stage alongside their fictional doppelgangers.
For Chalamet, the last year has been a whirlwind that swept him across countless awards season stages and made him a new-generation matinee idol. In Toronto, his trimmed locks and suave French answers on the red carpet spread like wildfire across social media. (Chalamet is a lifelong New Yorker whose father is French.)
Carell’s superfan
Chalamet’s most prized experiences from the last year or so are more about the work and the people it’s brought him in contact with. Beautiful Boy, which was shot in the spring of 2017, meant working with Carell, whom Chalamet has been a fan of all his life. “Getting to meet people I’ve always looked up to, those kinds of aspects were amazing and life-affirming in many ways,” says Chalamet of his 2017-2018. “But really the hope I had from last year is just that I be privy to more great projects. Everything and anything around that, even in my personal life, is in a healthy way the same.”
After the Oscars, Chalamet spent four months in Europe shooting the Netflix drama The King, inspired by Shakespeare’s Henry V. “It was great to just dive back into something right away and get in the mud, literally and metaphorically,” says the actor. “And just be back on the battlefield, the playing field and learning again.”
Getting to meet people I’ve always looked up to, those kinds of aspects were amazing and lifeaffirming in many ways.” Timothee Chalamet