Timothée Chalamet breaks out big
Timothée Chalamet is having his Wow Year.
The 21-year-old actor is the prince of awards season indies with his lead role in the acclaimed first love drama “Call Me by Your Name,” a perfect supporting turn in what many consider a perfectly crafted film, “Lady Bird,” and next month he’s playing every boy’s dream, a cavalry soldier, in the Western “Hostiles.”
Talking to the New York native, it quickly becomes clear that Chalamet has earned this breakout moment. Yes, he is clearly and versatilely talented, and his fervid fans will be pleased to know that his black mop of hair is an unruly marvel in real life, too, while his skinny frame looks good even when he’s wearing a sweater with eagle heads on it.
However, it’s the vibrantly intelligent way the actor speaks that really indicates why this guy is the hottest thing in movies.
“The approach I’ve had to auditioning and choosing what projects to do the last couple of years, the two most important parts of that process are the directors and the stories that are being told,” says Chalamet, who comes from a show business family on his mother’s side (his French father works for UNICEF) and attended the “Fame” school for performing arts in New York. “With ‘Lady Bird’ and ‘Hostiles’ and ‘Call Me by Your Name,’ those are three unique, and each important in their own ways, stories with filmmakers like Greta Gerwig and Scott Cooper and Luca Guadagnino, who are contemporaneously groundbreaking.
“And working with Christian Bale, Saoirse Ronan, Armie Hammer and Michael Stuhlbarg at a young age, you learn a lot by osmosis, certainly when you’re acting,” Chalamet adds, listingco-stars from the current three. “So the opportunities seemed like no-brainers.”
Chalamet has his biggest role in”Call Me by Your Name.” Based on Andre Aciman’s novel, Guadagnino’s film is set in and around a Northern Italian town in the summer of 1983. Chalamet’s 17-year-old Elio Perlman is spending the season at his mother’s family villa while his American academic dad (Stuhlbarg) researches Greco-Roman culture.
Multilingual, something of a piano prodigy and occasionally fooling around with an eager French girl (Esther Garrel), Elio’s world is rocked by the arrival of his dad’s handsome graduate assistant Oliver (Hammer). The two guys bicycle around and hit the local watering holes together, then become more than friends.
Delicate and charged, the tale’s open-minded approach to a smart young man’s confusing but enriching coming-of-age is what made Chalamet commit to the project long before it got made.
“It’s just very rare to read any stories that accurately depict the restlessness and tension of a young person’s mind on the verge of awakening spiritually, romantically, sexually,” he says. “When I was first made aware of the project there was no script, so I read the novel to have an idea of what the source material was about. Only one other time in my life had I had a reading experience where I felt like, wow, this is a window into a young person’s mind in such a specific and detailed way that I’ve never seen before. The other one was ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ by Stephen Chbosky.”
Impressed by Guadagnino’s earlier films “I Am Love” and “A Bigger Splash,” which he calls “visual masterpieces,” Chalamet was further charged up when he got to spend a week in Upstate New York with the legendary director of literary adaptations James Ivory (“Howards End,” “The Remains of the Day”), who ultimately wrote “Call Me’s” screenplay.
Then, although he’s played the piano fine for years, there were six weeks of keyboard lessons to get Chalamet up to Elio’s Bach and Ravel-mastering speed. Also crash courses in guitar and Italian. All while doing a lot of preproduction hanging out in Crema, Guadagnino’s hometown and wherethe film’s production was based.
“There’s a certain tonal ingratiation one gets spending a month and a half in a small Italian town,” Chalamet notes. “There’s a saying I like: ‘Europeans know how to waste time way better than Americans.’ That was very much the case spending a month and a half there in advance. I spent my summers growing up in France, so I had some understanding of what small-town European life was like, but not to the degree and specificity of what the equivalent would be in Italy.”
It wasn’t all work for a movie steeped in sensory pleasures. Or was it?
“I don’t think I’ll ever have an acting experience as immersive as this one again in my career,” Chalamet admits, “because if the prescription for any actor is to behave naturally within the given set of circumstances, there were many scenes in ‘Call Me by Your Name’ where the circumstances were to sunbathe. And certainly any sunbathing outside the set could be treated as research, right?”
The actor’s love scenes with both Garrel and Hammer get pretty intense. Preparation for these moments, especially the ones with Hammer, was perhaps the most worthwhile aspect of the job for Chalamet.
“They say experience is the greatest teacher, and the objective for both of us was just to spend as much time with one another as possible, to build a real connection,” he says. “It’s a movie without some sort of expositional, 90-degree turn or where there’s a bad antagonist. This is just a love story, plain and simple, which leaves much less room than usual for inauthentic beats or scenes we can just jump over. Luca was always on us to keep that real.
“But there’s simply the luck of the universe, too. Armie and I just get along fantastically as human beings. He’s one of my best friends today.”
Hammer has already been in a Twitter war with conservative actor James Woods over the propriety of a film about an affair between a man in his 20s and a 17-year-old boy. And there has been some grumbling that, with the film industry awash in sexual impropriety scandals at the moment, “Call Me by Your Name” may seem more inappropriate than it is.
“It’s just so clear when you see it that this is the most consensual of love stories,” Chalamet says. “In fact, the word ‘consent’ is used three or four times in the book. Outside of the movie that conversation makes sense, but for all the viewers of the film and people who’ve read the book, it’s impossibly clear how it’s not that.
“I encourage anyone to see this movie because it’s an unabashed celebration of love, in a time that’s maybe not as light,” he adds.
Chalamet would recommend, along with a rare 100 percent of Rotten Tomatoes critics, that you see “Lady Bird” too. He plays Kyle, one of the wryly disappointing first boyfriends Ronan’s title character copes with.
“Certainly, Kyle has to take a certain antagonistic tone,” the actor says. ‘But it’s a testament to how specific Greta makes everything that the role isn’t purely that, that he actually comes across as a human being that’s honestly behaving.”
Chalamet admits to being star struck on that one.
“Saoirse is one of the most intimidating and talented actresses I’ve ever worked with,” he says. “She is my age, I guess, but you feel like she’s 10 times more experienced and talented than you are. But she’s just a really kind and generous and giving actress and funny person.”
Chalamet was even more awed by his “Hostiles” costar Bale.
“‘The Dark Knight’ was the movie that really made me want to act,” says Chalamet, whose breakout role on the TV series “Homeland” happened a few years after Christopher Nolan’s Bale-starring Batman epic came out. “It’s why I was so thrilled to be in ‘Interstellar’ by Chris Nolan a couple of years after that. But getting to work a month and a half with Christian and seeing what he does? He’s one of the best to ever do it.”
There was no time for sunbathing making the grueling 1,000-mile trail Western. It’s change-ups such at that, though, that make Chalamet put his heart and mind into his work.
“The three to four weeks leading up to ‘Hostiles’ was a cowboy boot camp, going to a gun range every day and just general endurance-building, because the New Mexico climate can be so difficult,” Chalamet says.
“It’s the almost academic gifts acting can present sometimes, the contrasting preparations it requires. Makes you not want to pay for college!”