In September, the Met Gala in New York – Anna Wintour’s annual fusion of fundraising gala and celebrity parade – redesigned itself for generation Z. Instagram sponsored the event, Justin Bieber was its headline performer, and four young whippersnappers were enlisted as co-chairs: singer Billie Eilish, tennis player Naomi Osaka, poet Amanda Gorman and – the elder statesman of the quartet at 25 – Timothée Chalamet.
Chalamet turned up, typically tousle-haired and puppy-eyed, in an outfit of two halves. Up top, a cropped, snugly tailored satin tuxedo jacket by avant-garde designer Haider Ackermann, complete with cummerbund and blingy brooches. Below, a pair of baggy cream jogging bottoms, tucked into white socks and Converse trainers. Half princely film star, half kid at play: it’s a look that encapsulates the persona of the biggest, most hysterically obsessed-over teen idol to emerge from the movies since the heyday of Twilight.
It’s 13 years since that emo vampire saga launched Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson into the stratosphere, affording them the platform to build increasingly offbeat careers in independent and arthouse cinema. Chalamet, however, has done the reverse. Few actors have been propelled to mass-market stardom by a film as unlikely as Call Me By Your Name – Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s woozy, humid gay love story between Chalamet’s precocious teen Elio and Armie Hammer’s suave graduate student Oliver.
Released in 2017, the film grossed a modest £30m worldwide, yet Chalamet’s portrayal of gangly, confused first love – sealed by a scene in which Elio masturbates into a ripe summer peach – became the stuff of instant, obsessive and very online fandom. Before the year was out, a secondary role as a high-school dreamboat in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird cemented his next-big-thing status. Along came an Oscar nomination for Call Me By Your Name, making the then 22-year-old Chalamet the youngest best actor nominee since Mickey Rooney in 1940.
Chalamet wasn’t unprepared for the business. The son of an American mother who has performed on Broadway and a French father who works at Unicef, he grew up comfortably in New York City, summering at his grandparents’ home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Auvergne, and attended the famous LaGuardia school of performing arts. He briefly enrolled at Columbia University but dropped out for big-name acting opportunities. In 2014, he made his film debut in Jason Reitman’s best-forgotten Men, Women & Children, before making a stronger impression in Interstellar, directed by his professed favourite film-maker, Christopher Nolan.
Most young stars, after the status upgrade of Call Me By Your Name, would be drafted directly into massive studio fodder. Yet Chalamet has bided his time, taking a choosy, even curated, approach to his career. He’ll happily take a supporting role (he was an endearing, flustered Laurie in Gerwig’s Little Women) if the surrounding film reflects well on him. Even his singular red-carpet style – lots of editorial, gender-blurring fashion, nary a standard suit to be seen – plays into that elective air.
“We took to calling him ‘Prince Timmée’ in our posts because there’s a sort of aristocracy, cosplay element to his style, very Le Petit Prince,” says Lorenzo Marquez, co-editor of fashion commentary site Tom + Lorenzo. “He and his team know how to play with the perceptions of him: when you have a name like Timothée Chalamet, American audiences in particular are likely to see you as somehow more sophisticated and privileged than the usual movie star.”
Only now is he playing his first blockbuster lead, in no less vast a project than Dune. Denis Villeneuve’s lavish adaptation of the Frank Herbert sci-fi doorstop is centred on Chalamet’s nascent interplanetary warrior Paul Atreides; a sequel has just been greenlit, confirming him as the leading man of a bona fide Hollywood franchise. He’s currently filming Wonka, a musical prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which he stars as the young, eponymous confectioner. If he hit the big time four years ago, this appears to be the bigger time still.
“It’s cool to think about that trajectory,” says film-maker Julia Hart of his journey from indie icon to multiplex brand. She directed him in 2016’s Miss Stevens, the last film he made before Call Me By Your Name: a gentle, affectionate character drama, it features him, aptly enough, as a gifted, nervous drama student, climaxing with a killer monologue from Death of a Salesman. “He’s someone who knows what the small movies feel like, how hard they can be to make, and that you have to really love the material to even bother,” Hart says. “There’s a lot of hours put in. A lot of gratitude.”
Sure enough, Chalamet’s turn towardd blockbusters hasn’t yet come at the expense of his taste for alternative fare: opening on the same day as Dune last week was Wes Anderson’s hyper-precious ensemble piece The French Dispatch, one strand of which is led by Chalamet as a boy revolutionary in the May ’68 riots. (“He speaks French and looks like he might actually have walked right out of an Éric Rohmer movie,” Anderson has said of casting him.) In December, he’ll be back in Oscar-bait territory with Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio in Adam McKay’s satire Don’t Look Up; he recently reunited with Guadagnino to shoot the cannibalism-themed drama Bones & All. (A once-mooted sequel to Call Me By Your Name, however, is now on ice.)
That word Hart used – “gratitude” – comes up a lot in Chalamet’s interviews, where he plays up his youth and inexperience, and his wide-eyed wonder at being a part of it all. “I’m figuring it out,” he recently told Time. “On my worst days, I feel a tension in figuring it out. But on my best days, I feel like I’m growing right on time.” At other times, he dabbles in earnest luvvie-speak – easier to get away with when you’re young. “I really feel myself coming into my own as a community of thespians, as opposed to actors,” he said in a GQ profile last year, adding that he thrives on uncertainty in acting: “I want to get back to the undefined space again. I’m chasing a feeling.”
According to Hart, that guilelessness masks more decisive instincts: “Sometimes with these young actors you worry. They’re so young and so beautiful and so talented, and our industry can devour that. But I watched him take control. Ask for what he needed. And I felt he’d be OK.”
Chalamet’s public image is equally controlled, though not aloof: he has steadily kept fans happy while deftly avoiding controversy. Give or take some snaps with apparent on-off girlfriend Lily-Rose Depp, he’s no tabloid fixture, while his interviews and social media accounts mix standard self-promotion with checks of his own privilege, plus reflections on mental health and social justice. He took part, incognito, in last year’s George Floyd protests (“People might find it disingenuous, but I found it really grounding,” he told GQ), and even publicly expressed remorse for taking a role in Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York, donating his fee to Time’s Up, among other charities.
That plays into Chalamet’s image – buoyed up by his airy, androgynous beauty – as a new kind of Hollywood leading man, rejecting macho stereotypes in favour of a kinder, more wholesome delicacy. “He’s very savvy about avoiding the one thing that trips up so many young male stars when they hit it big: he’s not trying to grow up or grow out too fast,” says Tom Fitzgerald of Tom + Lorenzo.
“While promoting the mainstream film of his career, he’s still wearing the same sort of beautiful, gender-nonconforming, romanticised fashion that suits him best. So many male stars in his position would have ditched the queer-coded image for action-movie wear as soon as possible. He and his team realise it’s best to stick with what made you famous in the first place.”
At a young-looking 25 years of age, Chalamet still has growing to do: beyond Paul Atreides and Willy Wonka, it’s hard to anticipate what choices he’ll make once his natural boyishness fades. Still, it’s hard to see him ever taking a turn towards old-school masculinity, particularly as the poster boy for a generation defined by open vulnerability. Hart certainly hopes not. “When I watch an actor play a man, I don’t want tough,” she says. “I hate tough. I want honesty, I want transparency, I want tears. Timmy does all of that. And it’s wonderful.”