TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET
After his Oscar-nominated turn in Call Me By Your Name, TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET’S career exploded. Now he returns in historical drama The King and with a slate of must-see movies in the can. Total Film meets Hollywood’s new royalty.
Aka the man who would be The King, on Dune and Call Me By Your Name 2.
Timothée Chalamet is, you could say, having a moment. It’s a moment that’s been going strong ever since 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, the stunning love story that turned what was already a promising career for Chalamet into a gilt-edged one. Nominated for an Oscar for his role as Elio, the young man who finds comfort in the arms of Armie Hammer’s classics student, it marked Chalamet out as an actor of raw emotion, sensitivity and depth.
When Total Film catches up with the 23-year-old New Yorker for the first time since that breakout role, it’s clear he hasn’t changed a bit in the intervening two years. Polite and humble, stardom has yet to bruise him. There’s still something wide-eyed about the way he talks of his experiences, including his night at the Academy Awards. “I got to go with my mom. She’s my date when I have to go to big things. It was just a dream come true. Totally surreal. Surreal to this day. And when James Ivory finally won [Best Adapted Screenplay, for Call Me By Your Name], that was an insane moment.”
It hasn’t stopped there, either. Today, on a private Venetian island where the sumptuous Marriott Hotel sits, it’s about as movie-star glam as it gets. Outside the chalet of our appointed chat, Chalamet confers with a Chanel-sporting Lily-Rose Depp, his co-star from David Michôd’s new historical drama The King and, as it happens, his off-screen partner. But when he walks in, all waves of black hair and the hint of a ’tache, he re-focuses, casual but collected.
Right now, Chalamet is in the sweet spot. After the release in early 2019 of searing addiction tale Beautiful Boy, he’s just come off one of those years that actors dream of. He followed shooting Wes Anderson’s all-star hush-hush tale The French Dispatch with Dune, Denis Blade Runner 2049 Villeneuve’s hugely anticipated take on Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel. “While the worlds of Dune and The French Dispatch are very different,” he says with a smile, “what was parallel about the experience was it was their world.”
The same can be said for The King, a historical drama that’s very much a Michôd movie, conflating events covered in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Pt 1, Pt 2 and Henry V. Scripted by the director and fellow Aussie Joel Edgerton - who featured in Michôd’s 2010 debut, Animal Kingdom - The King sees Chalamet take the lead as Prince Hal, estranged son to Henry IV (Ben Mendelsohn, another Animal alumnus). An errant royal, he spends his days carousing with the ebullient Falstaff (Edgerton), until the death of his father means he ascends England’s throne.
While the film is a deliberate steer away from Shakespeare, with dialogue that swaps out verse for an approximation of 15th Century-speak (“My liege” etc), Chalamet is full of praise for its integrity. “We didn’t make this movie for clickbait. We felt the story had real dramatic merit in its original version, but also [in] the script that David and Joel put together. Also David and Joel are such good writers, the language feels understandable but is of the period – descriptive without feeling demonstrative.”
Still, it’s hard not to think that Chalamet is following in the footsteps of some of the greats. Both Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh directed themselves in screen versions of Henry V, playing the newly crowned king as he contends with the machinations of the French, ultimately leading to the Battle of Agincourt. “I felt like I was in good hands and could be oblivious to – or lean into, when I wanted – the strong irony of being an American playing an English king directed by an Australian.” When it comes to the themes addressed in The King, Chalamet believes the contemporary resonance rings loud and clear. “You can see in world leaders, even today when they get elected, then picture them four years later… they carry the weight of power.” In his eyes, The King deals with identity – “A young human who is still figuring out who he is and thrust into a set of circumstances and is out of his depth, and is well-intentioned but didn’t have a shot from the top.”
Chalamet also gets to use his bilingual skills, speaking French with Depp’s Princess Catherine. Like her, he’s halfFrench – though in his case, it’s his father, Marc, an editor at UNICEF, who gives him Gallic roots. His mother Nicole, an estate agent and former Broadway dancer, is a thirdgeneration New Yorker; his older sister Pauline acts, while his aunt is TV writer Amy Lippman (co-creator of Party Of Five) and his uncle is TV director Rodman Flender.
Divided between America and France, his upbringing sounds faintly idyllic – spending his summers in the small town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, “about an hour from SaintÉtienne,” perfect training for the sunkissed scenes of family leisure in Call Me By Your Name. “Ten months of the year I’d be in New York and you couldn’t ask for a more surreal change – to go from living in Hell’s Kitchen in New York to live with Grandma in a small town in France.”
Early on, playing football – or soccer, as he dubs it – was his dream. “I was very passionate about my soccer team; that was the main focus,” he says (he even coached kids in a French football camp when he was 13). At the time, acting came a distant second, not least after running the gauntlet of cattle calls for commercials. “It seemed to me auditioning was, ‘Who could smile the biggest?’ And that was a big turnoff to me. I didn’t want to be a part of that.”
Fortunately, he got admitted into the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. “The first day we had a class, I saw that acting was something to be taken seriously and a craft to be worked on,” he says. After making his screen debut in a Law & Order episode, it didn’t take long for Chalamet to find credible work. A recurring role in TV drama Homeland, as the son of the vice president, set the tone. “It became clear to me after I did Homeland that you’re only as good as the material and the director.”
By 2014, he was enjoying his big-screen unveiling, in Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children, and Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi extravaganza Interstellar. Playing Matthew McConaughey’s son in the latter, and working for Nolan, was huge. “The Dark Knight literally inspired me to take this seriously,” he says. “Heath Ledger as the Joker… I was like, ‘Wow, that’s what I want to do!’ And working with McConaughey… I’d just seen Dallas Buyers Club. That was
‘YOU COULDN’T ASK FOR A MORE SURREAL CHANGE – TO GO FROM LIVING IN HELL’S KITCHEN IN NEW YORK TO LIVING WITH GRANDMA IN A SMALL TOWN IN FRANC’E.”
a real kid-in-the-candy store experience.” Two years later, he was honing his stage skills for an award-winning performance in John Patrick Shanley’s Prodigal Son, as a misfit Bronx kid in a prep school. Along the way, missteps have been rare; after working on Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day In New York, he donated his salary to Time’s Up, RAINN and the LGBT Center in New York, after historical allegations of sexual abuse around the director resurfaced in the wake of #MeToo. (“I don’t want to profit from my work on the film,” he announced on Instagram.) Largely, though, Chalamet’s career arc has been nothing short of extraordinary.
Later this year, he can be seen as Laurie in Greta Gerwig’s lush adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. After playing Kyle in Gerwig’s much-heralded debut, Lady Bird, alongside Saoirse Ronan, who also features here, it was a joyful reunion. “I would do anything for Greta, but also with Saoirse Ronan. I haven’t seen it yet but I’m super-proud of it. I think I’ll see it the way that I heard Saoirse will see it, which is wherever the premiere is.”
Chalamet will also be reuniting with his Call Me By Your Name coterie in the not-too-distant future, for the proposed sequel, Find Me, expected to be set in Paris. Just days before we meet, he’s been visiting director Luca Guadagnino, who is currently shooting another project not far from Venice. So is he looking forward to returning to Elio? He smiles. “Not like looking forward in the immediately contemporaneous sense. It’s not going to be any time soon, I don’t think. But, yeah, that’s something I feel as enthusiastic about as, I think, Armie feels. Luca as well.”
In the immediate future, it’s likely to be Dune that will send him stratospheric, with Chalamet cast as Paul Atreides, the role inhabited by Kyle MacLachlan in David Lynch’s ill-fated 1984 attempt to adapt Herbert’s sprawling sci-fi. Will Villeneuve’s vision blow our minds? “I could just say ‘yes’ to your question,” he says, after pausing for an age. “Based on the experience I had, I have very high hopes for Dune. Both as something hopefully to be seen by a lot of people but also as an individual work of art.”
It all sounds utterly bewildering for most actors to take in, and a reminder of another theme The King throws up, as mentioned by Joel Edgerton: “A lot of people have asked Timmy and Lily-Rose in particular about the new kind of royalty, this social media frenzy… that Timmy is literally a modern prince.” It’s an intriguing idea (and that frenzy has only increased as Chalamet’s been papped with Depp, and his red-carpet outfit at the Venice Film Festival has made numerous ‘Best Dressed’ lists).
What does he think of Edgerton’s comments? Another inordinately long pause follows. “I have to get my words right,” he says, eventually. “I think within the role of this movie, and other roles I’ve played and life period… I think you go up to go down, you go to the right to go to the left and you go to the left to go to the right.” A slightly cryptic answer, but it’s clear he’s desperate to preserve the purity of his experiences. “I’ve really been getting to do what I love.”
THE KING IS IN SELECTED CINEMAS AND AVAILABLE ON NETFLIX FROM 1 NOVEMBER. LITTLE WOMEN IS RELEASED ON 26 DECEMBER.