Timothee Chalamet received the second Oscar nomination of his young career this week, and he’s a favorite to take home the trophy. In many ways, his work as Bob Dylan A complete unknown Classic Oscar fare: An Academy favorite who dons prosthetics and learns how to play guitar for his turn as a music icon. Yet even as Chalamet campaigns assiduously for the trophy, the publicity offense he’s mounting doesn’t look like a traditional Oscars campaign.
Chalamet has always had a flair for the weird, and now he’s playing it up. Riding a bike on the red carpet for its London premiere A complete unknown and fined $79.53 for failure to park properly. In December, He was a guest on the popular pre-game football show College Gameday I, a woman who writes about celebrities for a living, won’t pretend to understand, but to analyze what I’m faithfully informed by shows the staggering levels of football nerdery. This weekend, he will take a turn as both host and musical guest Saturday Night LiveAnd the promotions winked at the viral Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest held in Washington Square Park last fall, where he dazzled attendees by appearing in person.
“Timothy, arguably the top actor of his generation, and the youngest contender in the Best Actor field this season, isn’t subscribing to the usual Oscar playbook and is navigating the circuit with the seriousness and maturity of someone a decade older. So some old-ass voters in Palm Springs are taking him seriously. will take,” Celebrity commentator Lenny Gossip wrote approvingly after the Golden Globes. “Because his work is already serious. His talent is already serious. That’s all that matters and the rest is just who he is.”
Chalamet rose to the top of his generation’s A-list, able to coordinate opposition with seeming ease.
Chalamet’s press tour whim works not only because of the importance of his talent and the opportunity it buys him. It’s also a showcase for one of her greatest strengths as a celebrity: the ability to embody duality.
We love movie stars who can simultaneously embody both sides of a paradox, the way Marilyn Monroe embodies both sexuality and innocence at the same time, or the way Marlon Brando embodies both authenticity and artistry. It’s that complexity that makes a great star image unforgettable. Chalamet has risen to the top of his generation’s A-list by being able to combine opposites with seeming ease: masculine and feminine, very young and ageless – and in recent months perhaps most original, artist and brother.
Chalamet looks fundamentally odd for a Hollywood A-lister. He is tall, but he is pale and thin; From the moment he made his first gangling teenage steps across the screen call by your namePeople started joking about how he looked like a starving Victorian urchin. He is undoubtedly attractive to girls as well the titanic-was the Leonardo DiCaprio of the era: He has a kind of androgynous waifish beauty that speaks tenderly to teenage hearts. He looks so young and so vulnerable, which is part of why it’s so fun to watch him play against type.
Chalamet’s collaborators often spoke of his performance in terms of this duality. Denis Villeneuve, who cast Chalamet the hill As a black teenager who becomes a messiah, told GQ in 2020 A combination of age and youth, he is drawn to Chalamet.
“You think he’s already lived several lives,” Villeneuve says. “And at the same time, he looks so young on camera. Sometimes he looks about 14 years old. There’s this kind of typical youth in his features and that contrast with the old-soul quality in his eyes — a kid who knows more about life than his age.”
She has a kind of androgynous waifish beauty that speaks tenderly to teenage hearts.
In Greta Gerwig little womanChalamet plays Laurie, a music-loving boy with a girl’s name who is the opposite and best friend of Saoirse Ronan’s tomboyish Jo.
“One of the things we talked about a lot while doing Little Women, both in terms of our characters, but also in terms of ourselves and as people, is that we both have this masculinity and femininity in equal measure,” Ronan said. told GQ in 2020. “And I think that’s one of his strengths, he can be incredibly feminine and sensitive and sensual, and he’s also a guy that, you know, girls fancy.”
Chalamet tends to flaunt this quality on the red carpet, where he favors an extravagant rock and roll androgyny: Backless jumpsuit And 70s velvet — much like the clothes of a man who has come of age in the “no homo” generation.
Eric Vetro, meanwhile, is her vocal coach for both Wonka And A complete unknown, told GQ in 2023 That Chalamet’s great strength was his ability to balance exuberance with respect for work. “He does everything with such a playful air, but there’s always a core of real seriousness where he’ll nail it.”
It’s the same duality that Lenny Gossip is highlighting when he says that Chalamet’s work earned him the right to play in his Oscar campaign: serious and mischievous at once.
But the duality Chalamet is now experimenting with is something he hasn’t shown much of before. It’s artist vs brother.
In the past, this duality was most clearly manifested through his relationship with Kylie Jenner, which shocked fans when it was first revealed in 2023. Did they claim Timothée Chalamet, the Kardashian-Jenner sister most famous for selling lip liner with her poet’s face and genuine actor’s cred?
On the one hand, Timothy was an extraordinarily talented man. On the other hand, he 28 year old man. A 28-year-old dating a Kardashian, even! How to reconcile the two?
Club Chalamet, a 57-year-old social media poster and the internet’s most prominent Chalamet fan, Hosted a Twitter space at the time Where the rest of the fandom can process the trauma of the moment. Kylie, says Club Chalamet, “attracts a certain crowd with very low IQs.” Fans worried in tweets that she had “nothing to offer Timothy on an intellectual level,” that she was too “artificial.” Ultimately, however, Club Chalamet is over“Timothy Chalamet is a 28-year-old man making a 28-year-old man’s decision about his life, and we have to accept that.” Regardless, “Club Chalamet is here to stay because Timothée is an incredibly talented person who works on projects that are compelling and incredibly exciting.”
The basic problem was: On the one hand, Timothy was a man of extraordinary talent. On the other hand, he 28 year old man. A 28-year-old dating a Kardashian, even! How to reconcile the two?
promoting A complete unknownChalamet is circling the issue — only this time, he’s doing it in a way that delights his fans instead of making him uncomfortable like his relationship with Jenner. That’s part of his appearance College Gameday It was very funny: It played hard against his artistic type, but it showed his brother side strongly.
Chalamet has talked about sports in his interviews before: In a GQ profile in 2018He recreated the famous Knicks press conference in the Madison Square Garden press room. Yet the idea of Chalamet as a sports fan never particularly took root in his star image, perhaps because the idea of Chalamet as artist, highbrow and feminine-coded was so strong, and perhaps because he simply didn’t look like one. A man who was into sports. As GQ put it in 2018He has a “frame forged in high school without a football team.”
Now, that has changed. in him College Gameday In attendance, Chalamet outshines some of the professional sports commentators on the panel with him. “Timothy Chalamet may be the best we’ve ever seen,” Commented a Sports Illustrated writer Chalamet’s predictions came out one after the other.
Perhaps more revealingly, Chalamet began to suggest in interviews that he was not as artsy and Byronic as his pale, skinny appearance and fancy French name suggested. In a 2024 profile with Rolling StoneChalamet revealed that his dream was to star in an action franchise, a role for which he unsuccessfully auditioned. Maze Runner And DivergentThat she was always rejected because she didn’t have the muscle tone to look the part.
Chalamet began to suggest in interviews that he had never been as artistic and Byronic as his pale, skinny appearance and fancy French name suggested.
“I was trying to gain weight. I could not! I basically couldn’t. My metabolism or whatever the fuck can’t do it,” said Chalamet. He said he ended up in indie movies that made him a star more or less by default, because he couldn’t get the kind of roles he wanted. “I knocked on a door that wouldn’t open,” he told Rolling Stone. “So I went to what I thought was a more humble door, but actually turned out to be explosive for me.”
Everyone knows that Chalamet is a great actor, which is why it’s always been easy to think of him as intellectual and artistically driven — from his breakout character to call by your nameMaybe a little older but no less innocent. Which means that the more Chalamet insists that in real life, he’s actually a football-loving Kardashian-dating bro, his screen work looks more impressive by comparison. After all, it takes generations of talent to transform a brother into an artist right before your eyes.
