Timothée Chalamet

Timothée Chalamet (birthname: Timothée Hal Chalamet) has become, in less than five years since his breakout role in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017), one of his generation’s most talented movie actors, seeming to expand his range with each succeeding movie. To watch Chalamet on screen in chronological order is to watch a young actor develop, part by part, not unlike a young Robert De Niro.

His film career began with a tiny part in the starry cast of Jason Reitman’s small-town-Texas comedy-drama, Men, Women & Children (2014), with Emma Thompson, Rosemarie DeWitt, Adam Sandler, Jennifer Garner, Judy Greer, Ansel Elgort, J.K. Simmons, and Dennis Haysbert. Scoring a role in a Christopher Nolan movie—Interstellar (2014)– at age 18 was a good sophomore move for Chalamet’s visibility, alongside Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain and Ellen Burstyn.

Chalamet was cast in his first co-lead role in Andrew Droz Palermo’s fantasy thriller, One & Two (2015), with Kiernan Shipka and Elizabeth Reaser, premiering at the 65^th edition of the Berlin Film Festival. Chalamet joined cast members James Franco, Ed Harris, Amber Heard, Cynthia Nixon, and Christian Slater in Pamela Romanowsky’s true-crime The Adderall Diaries (2015), premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Chalamet was a small part of the cast of Lionsgate’s Christmas family comedy, Love the Coopers (2015), with Steve Martin, Alan Arkin, John Goodman, Ed Helms, Diane Keaton, and Anthony Mackie, followed by writer-director Julia Hart’s well-reviewed feature debut, Miss Stevens (2016), with Lily Rabe, and premiering at SXSW festival. Timothée Chalamet’s breakthrough as a star came in 2017, opposite Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name, and earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination (making him the third-youngest ever nominated in this category).

Chalamet’s first starring role followed in Elijah Bynum’s writing-directing debut, Hot Summer Nights (2017), with Thomas Jane and William Fichtner, and released by rising indie distributor A24. Chalamet was memorably cast in another writing-directing debut, this one by Greta Gerwig in her autobiographical Lady Bird (2017), opposite the extraordinary cast of Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges, and Beanie Feldstein.

After a small role in Scott Cooper’s acclaimed Western, Hostiles (2017), with Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, Wes Studi, Adam Beach, and Jesse Plemons, Chalamet co-starred with Steve Carell in his most intense role to date in Felix van Groeningen’s version of Nic and David Sheff’s joint memoirs, Beautiful Boy (2018), and released through Amazon Studios. Chalamet scored acting nominations from the BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild, Critics Choice Awards, and the Golden Globes, though he was snubbed for the Oscars.

Chalamet’s next was also via Amazon (which then dropped the film amidst massive controversy), starring in the little-seen Woody Allen rom-com, A Rainy Day in New York (2019), with Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Jude Law, Diego Luna, and Liev Schreiber. David Michôd’s Shakespearean epic, The King (2019), provided Chalamet with his grandest role as Henry V, alongside Joel Edgerton, Robert Pattinson, Lily-Rose Depp, and Sean Harris, and released by Netflix after a Venice film festival world premiere.

Rejoining writer-director Greta Gerwig for her second feature, Little Women (2019), Chalamet played romantic support to Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Laura Dern, and Meryl Streep. 2021 was a banner year for Chalamet, most prominently as the young hero, Paul Atreides, in Denis Villeneuve’s beautiful adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic, Dune, opposite Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, and Zendaya; this was followed up with the sequel, Dune: Part Two, set for release by Warner Bros. in 2024 under Villeneuve’s direction, and also featuring Lea Seydoux, Christopher Walken, and Florence Pugh.

Chalamet participated as an on-camera guest in Robert Alexander’s documentary portrait of singer-songwriter Kid Cudi, A Man Named Scott, and was a key member of Wes Anderson’s typically sprawling cast in The French Dispatch, which allowed Chalamet to show off his French side in a spoofy sketch involving revolutionary French students. Chalamet capped 2022 with a supporting role in Adam McKay’s ambitious social satire about the end of the world, Don’t Look Up, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, and Mark Rylance.

Reuniting with director Guadagnino, Chalamet co-starred with Taylor Russell in Bones & All (2022), a dark road movie about vagabonding cannibals, co-starring Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland, and Jessica Harper, and premiering at the 2022 Venice film festival. Besides Dune: Part Two, Chalamet’s other major starring role in 2023 was as Young Willy Wonka in Warner Bros.’ Wonka, whose story (by director and co-writer Paul King, with Simon Farnaby) is a prequel to Roald Dahl’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. At least in 2023, the pair of projects makes Chalamet the face of Warner Bros., a rare stroke for any actor in this era.