Every once in a while, a young new heartthrob takes Hollywood by storm. These past few years, that person has been Timothée Chalamet. Appearing in one Academy Award-winning film after another, Chalamet has been praised for the depth and passion he brings to his characters at such a young age. How did he become the celebrated actor he is today?
His Childhood
Chalamet grew up in Hell's Kitchen, a neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan known as one of New York City's primary homes for actors, arts organizations, and gay culture. His family has many ties to entertainment and show business: his father is an editor, his mother was a dancer on Broadway, his older sister is an actress, and several aunts and uncles have enjoyed careers in Hollywood as writers and directors as well.
Chalamet had a very vibrant childhood. He was passionate about everything he did, including performing, playing sports, and schoolwork. He spent many summers with his family in France, where his father was raised, and where his unique name hails from. But Chalamet wasn't sure what path he wanted to follow in life until, at age 12, he saw Heath Ledger's Academy Award-winning performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight and was inspired to become an actor. After this life-changing point, he began studying acting, and eventually attended the famous Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan.
His Early Roles
As he finished his senior year of high school, Chalamet landed a gig on the Showtime drama series Homeland in 2012. Two years later, he appeared as Matthew McConaughey's son in the popular science-fiction film Interstellar, which brought in over $677 million in international box offices, helping him gain recognition and propelling him closer to stardom.
It wasn't long before Chalamet started getting roles in bigger productions, such as the coming-of-age dramedy Hot Summer Nights. In an interview with HuffPost, Director Elijah Bynum said of the first time he met the teenager in 2014, "It was kind of love at first sight. He came bounding into the meeting, and he had sweatpants on and a backpack. His hair was all messed up, and he had this big smile on his face. We met for probably over two hours. I don’t know that I got many words out. It was just him going on and on and on about the script and how much he loved it and how badly he wanted to do it and how he was so terrified to even put himself out there because if he didn’t get the role he didn’t know how he was ever going to get over it...everyone on the team knew Timmy was our guy."
His Breakthrough
As Hot Summer Nights wrapped filming in 2015 but waited in the wings without a distributor for several years, Chalamet accepted a role in the film that would really rocket him to worldwide star status: Call Me By Your Name. In the critically acclaimed film, Chalamet starred alongside Armie Hammer as a smart, sensitive teenager who falls in love with a handsome older man. Chalamet's humility and eagerness to learn shone through in his preparations for the role; as the movie took place in Italy, he spent a month and a half there learning the language, as well as how to play the piano and guitar in order to build out a more full-bodied, realistic portrayal of his character.
Shortly afterward, he was cast as another brooding, magnetic character in another Academy Award-nominated film, Lady Bird, and became his own kind of sex symbol overnight.
Bynum said of his rapid gain in popularity, "[The producers and I] would sit and laugh, and laugh in the sense that we can’t believe that our little Timmy is becoming what he’s becoming. It felt like watching a little brother all of a sudden grow up. When we cast him, we tried to cast the sweet, unassuming boy next door, the underdog. Him landing the girl in the movie Hot Summer Nights was really something of a stretch. He ended up with someone way out of his league, and now, of course, in real life no one would think of it that way... Watching it now, there’s no one who has any difficulty believing that the popular, pretty girl would fall for Timothée. But at the time we were making the movie, it certainly felt like it.”
What's Next For Chalamet?
Chalamet has continued to grace the screen with his presence in the past couple of years, most recently in the lauded Little Women, and will soon star in Wes Anderson's much-anticipated The French Dispatch, among other projects. But it doesn't seem he has (or will lose) the humility and casualness that has made him so beloved to many fans worldwide. Chalamet told GQ magazine in 2017, "All this stuff’s very new — I’m trying to keep a journal and really remember this time of my life. It feels special."