Translation of Timothée Chalamet for Les Inrockuptibles (February 7th, 2018).

Original post here.



To uncover an Oscar nominee for Best Actor younger than Timothée Chalamet (who just celebrated his 22nd birthday), we need to go back to Mickey Rooney, 19 years old in 1939, in Babes in Arms by Busby Berkeley. This isn’t necessarily a comparison that we would have thought of by ourselves, but because destiny is bringing us to it, we admit that we can find some of Rooney’s youthful liveliness in Chalamet. A constant curious and happy way of living, that we can only extrapolate from Rooney’s roles (because we never met him), that jumped out at us when we met Timothée in a Parisian palace, where he came to promote the movie that earned him the nomination: Call Me by Your Name.



Even if he was here to talk about Luca Guadagnino’s movie, he didn’t refrain from talking about Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, which comes out the same day. Also, on February 28th, be prepared to hear this French name over and over, worn by a young American actor destined to a great career: Cha-la-met. ’’I finally have the two passports and I’m very happy about it’’, he specified to us – without us asking, we’re not from the police – in an impeccable French, that he was sorry he couldn’t last the whole interview, considering he was more comfortable in his mother tongue.

Timothée Chalamet almost skips when he enters the hotel room where we were meeting. He’s wearing jogging pants paired with sports socks and white sneakers. Accompanied with his publicist (that will stay in the room, in case one of our questions displeases him), he gives the impression of someone that fills the space. That imposes his presence. That burns calories. He doesn’t particularly looks stressed, but he moves a lot, plays a beat on his thighs with his fingers, runs his hand through his messy long brown hair and talks constantly, without always looking at his interlocutor in the eyes. Sometimes, he answers questions without us even asking them, as if he’s carried away by his enthusiasm. ‘’I can wander and get off track sometimes’’, he admitted. His speech is familiar but not plain, contrarily to many actors that started young (he began at 10) and that were formatted by media training. Brilliant, evidently, he is committed to sharing his passions. He knows that the moment is his, that he’s living his last moments of adolescence before the inevitable starification. So he’s on a final spurt.

It’s been exactly one year, ‘’53 weeks to be exact’’, that the promotion for Call Me by Your Name began, at Sundance. Since then, every step has been triumphant: maximal praises, an intense campaign. ‘’All of this is very tiring but extremely exciting, especially for someone as young as I am. I’m meeting actors and directors that I admire, people that I’ve studied in class… I have to pinch myself often to be believe it’’, he confessed, with a sincerity impossible to doubt. Over the moon, he added: ‘’The first dream of all actors is to make a living with his/her job; the second is to participate in projects that resonate with us; the third is that these projects find their viewers, their public. I have already accomplished those three dreams.’’

(I won’t translate that part, they’re explaining CMBYN and making judgments against Armie that I don’t feel are necessary to translate. Stupid.)

The actor laughed when we asked him how many questions he answered about the notorious scene with the forbidden fruit: ‘’I haven’t made the count but practically every interviewer asks me one… It’s a thing that will stay. But was matters the most in CMBYN, what matters to me, is that it presents love and sexually in a positive way. It’s not that common, if you think about it. It’s for that reason, I believe, that people are projecting/identifying to it so powerfully’’.

And him, in what movie did he project himself when he was younger? ‘’Mean Girls. I saw it for the first time when I was around 10 years old, and I’ve seen it numerous times since then. I love it more with every viewing. For the people of my generation, that counted!’’. Other than this masterpiece (let’s dare!) of teen movies, he cites disorderly some French classics that he watched with his family, during summer holidays: La Grande Vadrouille (‘’Six times!’’), Les 400 Coups, Le Ballon rouge, La Boum and LOL (‘’Wait, it’s a super good movie!’’, he defended, when he saw our eyes widen).

Hard-working student, not to say the first of his class, Timothée likes when the directors he works with are also prescribers. Luca Guadagnino has thus showed him Alien, Babette’s Feast and Body Double – a pleasing program that confirms the ‘greedy’ (??) inclination of the Italian director. Greta Gerwig put together a menu composed of, among others, François Truffaut and Pedro Almodóvar to prepare him for the role of Kyle, the proud and nonchalant boyfriend of Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird. ‘’The tonality of this character was not particularly hard to find.’’ he confessed. As a matter of fact, not more than Elio’s, the boy in Call Me by Your Name, for which he had a pure joy to learn, before filming, guitar, piano and Italian. For Hostiles, finally, a western with Christian Bale due to come out on March 14th, he plays a cavalry soldier, he had to learn horseback riding – ‘’but like in the 19th century’’ – and how to use old firearms.

If learning is inherent to an actor’s job, we feel in Chalamet a world of knowledge, a curiosity without ends, a desire to live a thousand lives, and according to him it originates from his childhood in New York: ‘’I grew up in a melting pot of cultures, on the 33th floor of a building, floating over the sky, and I’m under the impression that it allowed me to have a free relationship with my identity. I don’t spend my days going around in circles, asking myself who I am. I am who I feel like being.’’

As the questions were going by, we learned to know him, and it was his easygoingness that baffled us. We asked him to tell us how his calling was born, and he answered hat he didn’t know, that ‘’it happened just like that’’, naturally. He admitted that having a dancer mom (in ballet, and then in musicals), a television director uncle and a series producer aunt probably helped. ‘’Some have very elaborate stories, but I can only tell you one thing: I can’t not play.’’

Thus, at 10 years old (in 2005, even though the movie is dated 2008 on IMDb), he took his first steps in a horror short film, Sweet Tooth. He was pleased. So he continued the castings and small roles before landing, in 2012, the role of the son of the vice-president in the second season of Homeland. At 17, he finishes school (the prestigious LaGuardia High School of Music & Performing Arts, that served as set of Fame) and has no doubts with his future – even if he never really had any. He remembers a meeting, in class, that marked him: Edie Falco, great actress of The Sopranos, had answered a student that had asked her to describe her professional routine: ‘’I have no idea, but I execute it every time’’. He made this his mantra.

Then, off to Columbia University in New York, to study cinema. But within the first year, he was cast in Interstellar – he played, in the first part, the son of Matthew McConaughey, role continued by Casey Affleck in the second part – and decided to stop his studies to dedicate himself to acting full time. Would he have liked to develop his education further? ‘’I, for a long time, have agonized at the idea of missing out on something, but now when I see everything that I have learned since then, I tell myself that I’m OK.’’

(… the writer talks about Woody Allen)

Chalamet decided to give the entirety of his salary to Time’s Up, to a LGBT center in New York and to an association that supports victims of sexual violence. We would have loved to talk to him about his choice, but, supervised by his publicist, he refused to answer any question about that subject.

We talked to him about film directors he’d love to work with: the brothers Safdie, Josh Mond, Sean Baker or Xavier Dolan. Some tunes from his playlists: I Put a Spell on You from Nina Simone, some Frank Sinatra, Gucci Gang from Lil Pump, and especially Man on the Moon from Kid Cudi, his favourite album, that accompanies him since 2009. Listening back to it, we understand better why it speaks to him so much, this Epicurean and Stoic ode, this confession of a young artist in full ascent, drunk on success, culminating with the song Sky Might Fall: ‘’The sky might fall, but I’m not worried at all’’, he said.