In a recent interview with Deadline, the 22-year-old actor talks about his chosen profession and how his latest release is “really an anti-glorification of drug use.”
Timothée Chalamet starred in Chris Nolan’s Interstellar as Matthew McConaughey’s son but it was his brilliant performance in Call Me by Your Name that not only landed him an Oscar nomination but made people within the industry curious.
But Call Me by Your Name was not a fluke. Chalamet is back this Oscar season with his recent release, Beautiful Boy. He stars as a journalist and drug addict, Nic Sheff opposite Steve Carell as his father.
One look at the trailer and it’s easy to predict that Chalamet is on the short-list for the Best Actor trophy.
In an extensive interview with Deadline, the young actor spoke about a lot of things including his choice of roles and how important they are to him.
“The types of roles I hope to do are things where I’ll hopefully have to shapeshift,” Timothee Chalamet told Deadline. “It’s important not to feel the work of someone onscreen, and instead to feel the urgency or the reality of the story being told; and that doesn’t mean it has to be immediately relatable.”
The young actor, quickly rising to the A-list, wrapped on David Michôd’s The King, earlier this year in which he plays the British Monarch Henry V alongside Joel Edgerton, Ben Mendelsohn and Robert Pattinson. According to Chalamet, his current mission is to understand the foibles of different time periods. “It’s been so satiating to be able to work on something where we have to learn the manners of the period. It’s challenging. It incorporates the madness of this all.”
Besides these projects, he’s playing Laurie in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women and for him both the films have been a “deep dive” into another way of life.
Speaking about his time at LaGuardia Performing Arts School, Chalamet recalled that it was the first time he felt he had an outlet, “and a way to learn about myself.”
It was there that he first started taking acting seriously. His sister Pauline was already enrolled, and he was “a little naïve to what it was going to be. I had an idea that it was like grid-style rows in a classroom, learning about drama,” he said. “It made it more of an experience. It feels like there’s honor in how, for so long, people have been in playhouses doing these things.”
Being among the first stars of the post-social media generation, where many his age seek fame through Instagram or YouTube accounts (and he has dabbled in both), Chalamet also looks to the history of his form and the greats that came before him, voraciously consuming cinema. The actor also turned to the site for footage of drug addiction for his performance in Beautiful Boy. It was this, along with spending time with addicts, which offered the epiphany he sought. “Oh wait, addiction doesn’t have a face. This isn’t a bridge I have to cross to understand playing this. This is a human illness. Don’t play the stereotype of a drug addict. Play a human who’s addicted to drugs,” shared Chalamet.
Noted Deadline: “Felix Van Groeningen’s movie is based on a true story and adapts two memoirs; David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy and Nic Sheff’s Tweak. It splits its time between the two of them: a son – Chalamet – confronting his own drug addiction, and his father, grappling with an inability to help.”
“It’s really an anti-glorification of drug use,” notes Chalamet. “If films with this subject matter lean into tragedy tonally, you’re almost prepared for it. Or they lean the other way, into a kind of celebratory, upbeat, tragically cool thing. This is, hopefully, what the reality of it is. The subject matter is already tough, and we want the redemption of it to be in plain sight, but the honesty is in how f*****g terrifying it is to be using, and also how terrifying it feels to be sober.”
Chalamet was offered the role in Beautiful Boy even before Call Me by Your Name put him on the map and made him the youngest Best Actor Oscar nominee since Mickey Rooney in 1940.
