Timothée Chalamet
IS THE BOY WHO WOULD BE KING…
The Call Me By Your Name star is Hollywood royalty.
As the son of an actress and grandson of a Broadway dancer, it was perhaps inevitable that 22-year-old Chalamet would want to act, modestly dreaming of getting to a point in that crapshoot of a vocation of becoming ‘economically sustainable’.
But he couldn’t have foreseen the moment he’s had over the last 18 months; gobsmacking audiences with his emotionally intelligent turn in Call Me By Your Name, quietly impressing alongside his hero Christian Bale in Hostiles, becoming a heartthrob with Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird and nabbing an Oscar nomination for Best Actor (the youngest nominee in that category since 1944). Economic stability is no longer a problem then, rather taking the next right step in a career he often talks about being “a marathon not a sprint”.
A grad of LaGuardia High School, Chalamet may have been drilled in the realities of showbiz, but his formative years spent appearing in Homeland, being directed by Christopher Nolan in Interstellar and treading the boards on Broadway seem to have provided him with healthy ambition as well as gratitude: “I have to tell myself: ‘Hey man, don’t worry about the project you didn’t get. You still need to pinch yourself. This is all great.’”
The projects he didn’t get (Spider-Man, Manchester By The Sea) are footnotes to the quality roles he has banked; playing a real-life meth addict in Felix Van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy, Henry V in David Michôd’s Netflix Shakespeare shake-up The King, re-teaming with Gerwig on classic Little Women, and essaying Paul Atreides for Denis Villeneuve’s re-imaging of Dune.
Opening during awards season, Beautiful Boy already has Oscar buzz thanks in part to Chalamet’s commitment to portraying a drug addict by dropping 20lb and needing medical intervention during a shoot he describes as “fucking nuts”, plus “a devotion to getting this story right”. Getting the story right is also on the agenda for a sequel to CMBYN, its planned 2020 release date making Chalamet the same age as his character, Elio – who is now a man and determinedly not a boy. “Everyone else will be amazed by what he grows into,” Greta Gerwig told GQ in anticipation of Chalamet’s bright post-Oscar future. “But I won’t – I’ve always known he’s a unicorn.”
ETA | 18 JANUARY / BEAUTIFUL BOY OPENS NEXT YEAR. THE KING, LITTLE WOMEN AND DUNE ARE IN PRODUCTION.