As a white male who has recently aged out of the 18–45 demographic, I have reached an odd inflection point: I am no longer the person for whom culture is made. Luckily, I have a middle-school-aged child and teach dramatic literature in an acting conservatory, and so can poll those younger than I in a feeble attempt to understand the world. Thus, when the good people of this website asked me for my thoughts on Timothée Chalamet, and I found myself at a bit of a loss, I decided to consult my students. Who better to judge a young star than young actors, after all? As soon as his name escaped my lips, I was shocked as the room exploded into the kind of response one wishes they got to the weekly reading: 18 voices, all overlapping at once as the befuddled teacher struggles to get the assembled youths to raise their goddamn hands.
“He reminds me,” one student said, “of the kid in high school who’s the most talented in your theater classes, so he gets all the leads even if he’s wrong for the parts.”
“He needs to play someone ugly!” another shouted.
Soon, the conversation became roughly divided by gender. The women tended to be over him even if they thought he was talented. The men enthused over his abilities and charisma. “He wants success and tries really hard for it,” one young man said, by way of defense, “and trying is cringe to our generation.” Marty Supreme would be impossible without him, another pointed out. It was obviously written for him, and he carries it. As great as the rest of the cast is, the movie wouldn’t work with anyone else playing that part.
One thing the students mostly agreed on, however, was that the world is very much Chalamet’s oyster. He is the major movie star of his generation, and one of the few actors of any age who can reliably open a movie to solid box office. He is also ubiquitous, always promoting a project or posing for a Chanel campaign or, unfortunately, rapping. He is always talkshowing, always redcarpeting, always memeing, always being paparazzied wherever he goes. And, my students said—some with worry, others with exasperation—this omnipresence has tipped into an overexposure that they find a little exhausting.
They’re not going to get a break any time soon. It’s awards season, which means that, whether you like it or not, Chalamet’s whole deal cannot be escaped. This has become a familiar tradition now, as Chalamet has been nominated for an Oscar four times, and been nominated for six BAFTAs and five Golden Globes. Given that he’s been to this particular rodeo more than a few times now, there have been few surprises to his many public appearances. He’s charming, boyish, confident but not irritatingly so. Part of the actor’s job is creating the “illusion of spontaneity,” the sense that what is being said and thought is thought and said for the first time, even if you’ve already done 50 takes, or are performing eight shows a week for months. Timothée Chalamet is extremely good at this sleight of hand, both when playing characters and when playing himself for the media.
The most shocking revelation about Chalamet to come out of this awards season was not his confirmation that he is in a serious relationship with the reality star and mogul Kylie Jenner, but his admission during the Golden Globes that he is 30 years old. “Thirty?!” I shouted at the screen to the surprise of my wife and dogs. “That guy is 30?!” But the internet confirmed it. Much to my chagrin, it turns out that Call Me by Your Name, the movie that earned him his first Academy Award nomination and made him a household name, came out almost a decade ago.
On screen, he is doing wonderful work exploring the human condition, but it can be hard to see anything but him.
A decade is a long time to play noodle-limbed teenagers and twentysomething manchildren, but Chalamet is our great personifier of the callow youth. In his breakthrough years, he played callow youths of the lovelorn/queer (Call Me by Your Name) and rocker/lothario (Ladybird) varieties. He then played a callow youth struggling with addiction (Beautiful Boy). He’s played one of the great callow youths of American literature (Laurie in Little Women), the callow-youth version of a beloved children’s book character (Willy Wonka in Wonka), and essayed the callow-youth period of Henry V (The King). He even played callow-youth space Hitler in two Dune movies (a third installment comes out this holiday season). Last year, he sought Oscar gold in A Complete Unknown (in which he acts out the callow youth of Bob Dylan), and now, in Marty Supreme, which he also produced, Chalamet is Jewish midcentury striving embodied in, you guessed it, a callow youth.
Over the course of those films, Chalamet has become a movie star, and an interesting corrective to the parade of steroidal gym bodies that have increasingly been foisted on the public since the inception of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The only beefcake star to have found sustained success recently is Michael B. Jordan, and he’s been a steady presence on screen since he broke our hearts as Wallace in The Wire at the age of 14. Paul Mescal looked totally lost when trying to anchor a blockbuster in Gladiator II, and Glen Powell, though he came strong out the gate with Anyone But You, Hit Man, and Twisters, has spent the past year losing momentum, with Chad Powers getting weak reviews, Running Man stumbling at the box office, and this weekend’s How to Make a Killing failing to do anything of the sort. John Krasinski has thrived more as a director than a star, and, while we’re at it, whither the various Chrises? Yet over the past decade, Chalamet has endured, and only risen to greater prominence, not by bulking up or butching out, but by parlaying his considerable gifts and fettuccine physique into a number of interesting films.
When Chalamet first emerged, his evident rival was Lucas Hedges. Hedges broke through first with an astounding, sensitive performance in Manchester by the Sea, which got him an Oscar nomination even before Chalamet, and he had a much larger (and better realized) role in Ladybird. He even made a rival callow-youth addiction drama in Ben Is Back, which, like Beautiful Boy, released at the end of 2018 (and, like Beautiful Boy, underperformed at the box office). Today, however, Hedges has far fewer projects under his belt, and spent most of the early 2020s taking a break from making movies.
But if Chalamet has a rival this awards season, it appears to be the actor whose career his now resembles most: Leonardo DiCaprio. Like “Leo,” “Timmy” has managed to transition from androgynous teen heartthrob to serious, goateed actor, via a series of callow-youth roles (including the ultimate one, Romeo in Romeo and Juliet). Like DiCaprio, Chalamet has worked on both blockbusters and prestige fare with respected auteurs. And like DiCaprio up through The Revenant, he also seems obsessed with—and to choose his material based on—winning an Oscar, for better and for worse. (In both their cases, the conventional biopic hasn’t been as quick a shortcut to awards glory as they might have thought.)
The past decade has also revealed that Chalamet’s talents are undeniable. He’s able to fine-tune both his vulnerability and charm with incredible precision. As Paul Atreides, Chalamet accurately captured the torment that the character experiences in the Dune novels, the foreknowledge that to claim his birthright and protect his family is also to doom untold billions to death. But he also charts each of the steps that take Paul from cocky and beloved princeling to feudal warlord to genocidal intergalactic messiah, and shows how such an odd, terrifying young man could recruit so many to his cause. I’m the one person on Earth who is left cold by Call Me by Your Name, but the depth of Chalamet’s performance is astounding. For all the steamy fruit masturbation and memeable dancing, what gives the film its power is how Chalamet shows Elio’s bratty antagonism toward Armie Hammer’s older Oliver give way first to interest, then to obsession, then to love, then to loss and grief, and finally to acceptance and survival, this final beat taking place over the credits in a three-minute-long uninterrupted shot of Elio staring at a fire. In Dune, Paul knows what is coming for him; his choice is whether to accept it. In Call Me by Your Name, Elio is forever surprised, as if he is wandering the mansion of himself, constantly unlocking new rooms he had never seen before. It is the illusion of spontaneity on a grand scale. Even in a misfire (in my estimation) like Wonka, Chalamet gives it his all, delivering a performance utterly free of cynicism.
In Marty Supreme, he bravely ditches any attempt to ingratiate himself with this audience. It can be challenging for actors to play unlikable characters. Your Hannibal Lecters and Richard IIIs are a different story—their villainy is resplendent, triumphant, delightful. Playing an everyday jerk, on the other hand, always carries the risk that the audience will, in turn, dislike you for the part you are playing. Actors sometimes unwittingly compensate for this by adding a little wink, a bit of comforting irony to clue us in that they know they’re playing a schmuck. There is none of this in Marty Supreme. You can sympathize with Marty Mauser or not, but that’s on you. He’s still going to be a narcissist, conning and whining and bragging his way through everyday life in pursuit of his dreams of fame and riches.
Yet, in revisiting Marty Supreme, I realized that my more skeptical students were also on to something. I couldn’t stop thinking about Inside Llewyn Davis, another profoundly Jewish film in which we watch a talented striver who is both con man and his own mark while he circles the drain. Both use their period settings to reinforce their irony—we know Bob Dylan is about to destroy Llewyn’s dreams and we also know table tennis will never be a big deal in the United States—and both involve the protagonist getting another man’s wife pregnant. But Inside Llewyn Davis is devastatingly effective, while Marty Supreme works only intermittently as a series of set pieces, for two reasons. It is partly because Marty suffers from the usual Safdie preference for high stakes over all else, including believable human behavior or structural rigor. But it is also because Oscar Isaac’s performance in Llewyn Davis was so unexpected, so clearly star-making, and so impressive that the wonder at that performance transfers onto the character he plays and pulls us through the movie even as events get only more and more excruciating to watch. No such transference is possible in Marty Supreme. As good as Chalamet’s work is in the film, we have seen him bring live-wire physicality and braggadocious ego to both the screen and the talk-show couch many times before. One key difference between DiCaprio and Chalamet, after all, is that the former is so mysterious that the only thing that Golden Globes host Nikki Glaser could find to mock him about—besides his well-known preference for dating twentysomethings—was how she didn’t know anything about him.
After the fall of the studio system and its reliance on typecasting, a new conventional wisdom arose that argued for serious actors holding themselves a bit aloof from press and marketing. You wanted to maintain some sense of mystery (or playfulness) about your personality so that audiences would stop seeing you as you disappeared inside the roles you played. You can see a great example of the playful approach to obfuscation in the short Maysles documentary Meet Marlon Brando, in which the star transforms into whatever each interviewer wants him to be in three different languages over the course of a press junket. It’s difficult to imagine Chalamet, whose partner is a reality TV star, reserving much of anything from the public. Or, as one of my students put it, he “truly disappears … into his marketing. And that’s what actors need to do in the 21st century.” (His true genius, she felt, was for social climbing. She meant it as high, if somewhat backhanded, praise.)
Like many things previous generations believed about art, the desire to construct and maintain an inner mystery was a bit self-aggrandizing on the part of actors. But like many things the current generation has made their peace with, selling ourselves all the time has come at an obvious cost. In Chalamet’s case, his relentless salesmanship, while far more charming than Marty Mauser’s, overshadows his art to such an extent that this piece wound up being in large part about it. On screen, he is doing wonderful work exploring the human condition, but it can be hard to see anything but him.
None of that is Chalamet’s fault, of course. He’s trying to excel in the world my fellow Gen Xers and I gave him. But I can’t help but hope that, should he win the Oscar this year—finally! at the age of 30!—it will bring a close to this first youthful phase of his career. Perhaps it will allow him to relax, just as it did DiCaprio, and find different modes and variations within his considerable gifts, and rededicate himself to the art he practices, as much as the business.
After all, at some point, his era of playing callow youths will come to an end, whether he likes it or not. In a way, his problem is the same as the ever-hustling Marty Mauser’s: No matter what vocation we choose, our true rival is Father Time. He always wins in the end, but we can stay in the game for a while longer, if only we know when the moment has come to change.