Timothée Chalamet - The Young Oscar Aspirant Star

By Sandra M Ríos U

X: @sandritamrios

Timothée Chalamet: The Young Oscar Aspirant Star | Reviewing the journey of a young icon and his search for the Oscar for Best Actor.

At just 30 years old and with a film career that began in 2014, Timothée Chalamet is aspiring for the Oscar for Best Actor, becoming the youngest living actor to receive a double nomination in this category, awarded by the Hollywood Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

His charm and on-screen and off-screen charisma have contributed to him being one of the standout stars of his generation. We review his cinematic journey.

It was recently revealed that the young Oscar aspirant star, to embody the music legend Bob Dylan in the biopic "A Complete Unknown" (2024), had to gain 10 kilos to match the musician's appearance in the early years of his career. He also prepared comprehensively for five years, learning to play guitar and harmonica, and worked with body trainers (to replicate the voice, dialect, and movements) and vocal technique coaches, with the aim of performing live on set, playing and singing complete songs by the artist, such as "I Was Young When I Left Home" and "The Times They Are A-Changin’". This is his 23rd film.

Timothée Hal Chalamet was born on December 27, 1995, in New York, United States, and grew up in the iconic Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan, also known as Clinton and close to the Broadway theater district. Chalamet has French ancestry from his father and Russian Jewish from his mother, giving him a mixed cultural heritage. His father is Marc Chalamet, a French editor who works for UNICEF, and his mother is Nicole Flender, a former Broadway dancer and real estate agent. Both have had a significant influence on his career.

Chalamet attended PS 87 William T. Sherman School in New York for elementary school. Later, he studied at the prestigious Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, known for being a specialized school in performing arts, which has also trained actors like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Jennifer Aniston, and Adrien Brody, with whom he competes this year for the Oscar.

After graduating high school, Chalamet enrolled at Columbia University to study cultural anthropology. However, he later transferred to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts to focus on his acting career. His path in cinema was gradual, starting with commercials, theater, and television, where he had a recurring role in the series "Homeland" in 2012. His official debut was in 2014 with "Men, Women & Children," directed by Jason Reitman, where he played a teenager struggling with issues like porn addiction and interpersonal relationships in the digital age. That same year, he also appeared in "Interstellar," playing Tom, the son of Matthew McConaughey's character.

It would be another two years before he was seen in the role that marked a turning point in his film career. This happened in 2017 with "Call Me by Your Name," under the direction of Luca Guadagnino. Timothée learned to speak Italian and, like with the Bob Dylan biopic, immersed himself in the country to familiarize himself with the culture and environment. It wasn't his first leading role, but it was his most significant, where he played Elio Perlman, a 17-year-old, intelligent and sensitive young man, son of an archaeology professor. The movie is set in the early '80s at an Italian summer house where Oliver, an American student (played by Armie Hammer) working with his father, arrives. Elio experiences an emotional and sexual journey with this visit.

The chemistry achieved with Hammer was so convincing that it is considered his true debut in cinema, receiving his first Oscar nomination. His final monologue, filmed in a single take, where his character cries in front of the fireplace after learning Oliver is getting married, will remain memorable. The recognition he did receive for this role was at the Independent Spirit Awards. It is said that this film represents the turning point for Timothée Chalamet because it demonstrated that, despite his youth, he is a serious and versatile actor with the ability to convey deep emotions with authenticity and subtlety. Additionally, the film became a contemporary LGBTI cinema benchmark.

After this role, his filmography filled with titles from renowned directors like Greta Gerwig, with whom he collaborated in "Lady Bird" (2017) and "Little Women" (2019); Woody Allen, in "A Rainy Day in New York"; Wes Anderson, in "The French Dispatch"; Adam McKay, in "Don't Look Up"; and Denis Villeneuve, in the "Dune" franchise. In an interview Chalamet gave to The New York Times in 2017, he said that for him, acting was about empathy, finding the humanity in characters, and understanding people who are not like oneself.

Just reviewing this filmography is enough to recognize that this young actor likes to take on challenging and emotionally demanding roles. "I am drawn to characters that challenge me, that make me feel uncomfortable. If a role doesn't scare me, it probably doesn't interest me," he commented to GQ magazine in 2021, the year when the lineup included four films he starred in (The French Dispatch, Dune, A Man Named Scott, and Don't Look Up), in an article titled "Timothée Chalamet is the leading man we need right now."

Chalamet has lived surrounded by fame but has managed it by understanding that his popularity does not define his career or his goal of continuing to work on stories that move people. "I try not to think too much about the pressure. I just focus on the work. If I start worrying about what people think, I'll lose sight of why I started acting," he said in a conversation with The Guardian, emphasizing that he did not intend to be a role model for anything. The great moment he is currently experiencing in Hollywood has been solidified with his participation in the big-budget films "Wonka" and the "Dune" saga, both from Warner Bros. The media attention he has received is something that has been documented insistently by the press. Rolling Stone published a discussion focused on fame and the pressure of being a young star.

Let's return to his latest production. Directed by James Mangold (Ford v Ferrari, Girl, Interrupted), the biopic focuses on Bob Dylan's transition period from acoustic folk to electric rock in the mid-60s, which is why the movie initially had the title "Going Electric."

Written by Jay Cocks, with revisions by Mangold himself, the story was approved by Dylan. The filming of "A Complete Unknown" was delayed for four years, first due to the pandemic and then due to the 2023 Hollywood actors' strike, forcing them to shoot in the first quarter of 2024. Timothée Chalamet immersed himself so much into the character of the music and modern culture legend that during pre-production, the actor had no contact with his co-stars on set, and Mangold referred to him as Bob the entire time.

Timothée Chalamet's career has been guided by a winning combination: the good selection of films he has been involved in and a very well-cared-for image, where he has remained humble and approachable. Chalamet almost always comes across as an authentic, sincere, charismatic, thoughtful, and grateful young man who, although not excessively active on social media, uses them smartly to project freshness.

We do not know what the fate of his career will be or how long the industry's and public's affection will last. What is certain is that this actor stays focused, as he made clear in an interview with Vanity Fair: "I don't know where my career is heading, but I hope to keep working with people who inspire me. I want to tell stories that matter, stories that make people feel something."

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