The Making (and Re-Making) of Timothée Chalamet - GQ Magazine

But the day after the Oscars, the moment the clock struck midnight and his carriage turned into a pumpkin, Chalamet was right back where he'd been before the whole fantasy had begun: in New York, with no credit card, no apartment, and no longer any structured demands on his time and attention.

I met Timothée for the first time at the onset of that initial blush of fame, when all of us were being introduced to an actor who had both rare talent and the un-engineerable it that chings like an audible sparkle off a jewel in a cartoon.

This summer, we were talking about all this on a little screened porch out back of a modest cabin in Woodstock when Chalamet recalled those three weeks.

“But if I kicked it with my friends, things could still feel the same.

Because I feel like if I'd caught up to it immediately, I would've been a psychopath or something.”.

I'm chasing a feeling.” .

He wanted so desperately to get this right, to express what he really meant, to feel the right feelings, to live the right way, to be the right kind of man for the people in his life that he knows he can and should be, despite everything else, despite the noise.

No telling when it might film, given everything, but for now he had more time to himself than he'd had in years, which meant time to maybe huff the vapors of some Woodstock Dylanalia.

“It's not like I'm suffering from lack of connection otherwise,” he said, “but it just really feels like I'm connecting to something here.” When he arrived, he discovered that his little house had a wall devoted to Dylan—to the albums he'd recorded in the run-up to his timeout in Woodstock in the late '60s.

He knew what the cabin might seem like—like some young actor taking himself way too seriously, “treating himself like an artist.” But he was back and forth between Woodstock and New York all month, bombing up and down the interstate in the Honda sedan he'd rented from Enterprise.

In the city, we spent time walking around Greenwich Village, Timothée in an identity-concealing face mask and bucket hat and sunglasses, able to search out old Dylan addresses in an invisibility cloak.

He rented the house in Woodstock, too, so that he could have a little space all to himself.

He craved the privacy to try things and to fuck up.

The month felt like a controlled burn.

It was like a lot of things, but here at the end of it, it just felt good to sleep.

Back at the start of the 30-month run that led to Woodstock, Timothée turned over the keys to JR's studio and went to Europe to shoot The King.

The role was like none of the films he'd just received notice for.

One moment he was on the battlefield of the biggest-budget drama he'd yet experienced, the next he was “back in New York, on the A/C/E at Port Authority, just like, What the fuck is going on?” It was a pattern over the past few years.

When I asked Gerwig to comment on the arc she's witnessed up close, from Lady Bird to Little Women, she wrote a note about “my friend Timmy”: “It's hard for me now, because I'm his friend, to see him strategically.… I love talking to him?

We can get on the phone and talk for an hour or more without even realizing it, just skipping from subject to subject, making jokes, me feeling old and happy and him being funny and anxious and delightfully all over the place.” It's an odd gap he finds himself in—forced to be more accelerated than most 24-year-olds while also having not lived enough life yet to fit in absolutely with the people he enjoys spending time with most.

“I'm confident in the way I'm trying to approach things now, how I'm setting up the angles.”.

Everything, Timothée said, was exactly the same as the first time except him.

Now he was in all the same rooms as before, the same lunches and dinners and cocktail parties, shaking hands with the same Academy members who showed up at everything to get a little nibble of the freshest biscuit, growling ominous things at him, like: You don't have my vote yet.… “I really don't know how to talk about this stuff, man,” he told me, “because my experience of it is at the center of it.

There's just some dark energy at these things, and this time around I felt like I could see it.

And yet I'm thinking, Why isn't this going the exact same way?”.

Some time around 1985.

Due to the episodic nature of the film, some of the other “stories” were already being shot when Timothée arrived in Angoulême, a town that reminded him of the one he spent time in growing up, “so French it was like a caricature,” he said.

Timothée had the opportunity, then, to hang with some of the elders he doesn't act with, like Jeffrey Wright, Bill Murray, and other seasoned members of the Wes Anderson troupe.

“It was immediately as if it wasn't his first time with our group,” Anderson explained.

Timothée had seen McDormand around for years, but he'd never felt like she was someone he could approach.

And man, that sounds pretentious, but I just mean it's not about the fucked-up ladder of success and un-success, and being the guy or the girl, and then being off the list… That's not what I'm talking about with her on set, that's not what she's espousing to me.

It felt familiar to me, and no doubt to Timothée.

“He almost seemed weary of even talking about this stuff, it was so big and potent,” Timothée told me.

A week after our conversation in Woodstock, Timothée and I were in New York City, sitting on a bench along the Hudson, talking about what he's looking for when work resumes.

“How'd you recognize me?” he said, friendly, but genuinely curious, as if he hadn't just been shouting about art in a voice that sounded a lot like Laurie from Little Women or Timmy from late-night shows.

Director Denis Villeneuve told me Timothée was his “first and only choice” to play Paul Atreides, “the one name on the page.” When they met to discuss the prospect, Villeneuve told Timothée how happy he was to finally meet the young actor.

He was probably swearing at me because I didn't take him.” Timothée was party to so many stories like that one—glancing interactions with these heroes of his before he'd broken through.

“If I get hit by a truck next week, I'm looking at 20 to 23, I don't know if you can top that.”.

When you're on a smaller set, when there's 25 people, you can be friendly with 25 people.

When there's 800 people around, you cannot be friends with 800 people.” He chuckled.

As ever, Timothée had a special affinity with those people on set who were a little older, a little wiser.

“I felt like Timothée was deeply seduced—or maybe not seduced, but I just felt it was like a kid being with older brothers,” Villeneuve said.

There's a scene in the movie where Timothée runs into the arms of Jason Momoa, and Jason grabs him like a puppy and lifts him into the air like he was a feather.

It was very beautiful to see this young man being influenced by these people he admires.”.

We have very similar humor, and we can keep a joke going for a long time, but when the cameras start rolling and it's time to work, you can see it's game time, and he just taps into this brilliant intensity.

It's awesome to witness.” Villeneuve underlined the energy as well, describing for me just having seen Timothée the night before we spoke, and marveling at “that beautiful, strong candor.”.

“Not that it's for me—I say that with humility, because I feel that birth in all the movies he's done so far?

I'm feeling it's someone that has insane potential?

It was an example of the sort of stretch, in the gaps between shoots, when Timothée could indulge his passions for hip-hop and fashion and all these things he'd loved all his life that were suddenly accessible.

It was another of the delirious disorientations of the past few years—the way that people who were once subjects of his intense fandom were suddenly a part of his life as friends or acquaintances happy to have him around.

He is serious about keeping his former relationship with Depp to himself, but he did share one very sweet, very funny, very sad anecdote that encapsulates the spectrum of great and terrible that accompanies the private life of someone new to mega-fame like Timothée.

Many people had their laughs.

“I went to bed that night thinking that was one of the best days of my life,” Timothée told me.

And then people are like: This is a P.R.

This was how things worked now.

“He's incredibly gracious and grateful in relation to his work and the people he works with.

I think he's become more open as an actor.

“But I'm also not surprised.

There just aren't many other young male actors out there like him, who are able to hold an audience in the way that he does.

One of the things that we spoke about a lot when we were doing Little Women, in terms of our characters, but also in terms of myself and him as people, is that we both have this masculinity and femininity equally.

He can be cute, but that only gets you so far.… And so I've seen him learn how to separate himself from all that other stuff when he's on set, when he's working.”.

In Woodstock, Timothée had described to me with greatest admiration the way that Ronan can act in these films, at this highest level of acclaim and attention, but also remove herself, uncomplicatedly, from all the fuss: “She is like a superhero when it comes to this sort of thing, going through it so healthy—with the asterisk being excellent work across the board and four Oscar nominations?

“He's 24, and he's gonna have a great time, and I would never judge him.

But he's had one sort of attention—I do feel like boys get it on a whole other level.

I've always let him know, and he's always let me know, we can talk to each other, and we do.

He has good people around him, and I'm one of them, and Greta as well—we all kind of look out for one another.”.

But never did things feel less uncertain, less self-conscious, than when he was marching, anonymously, alongside hundreds or thousands of others in Los Angeles in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

“With a mask, a hood, a hat, glasses—my face is deleted,” he explained, “and I'm literally presenting a physical form, you know?” A single body in space that, like a vote cast in an election, is democracy embodied, but anonymous.

“It was Oh shit, I don't feel out of place—and yet I haven't been in a crowd like this for years.”.

“I have so many thoughts on so much of it,” he said, “but I don't see the benefit of putting it down for consumption until I've really worked out exactly how I feel about it all?

Staying in motion, showing up, being a body—it's a good place to start while he works out the rest of how he's meant to live a life true to his values with everyone watching.

He wants the benefit of their knowledge and experience, and he's okay if it's slow going to accrue it.

He's open to playing the role of the novice still.

But there have also been things in his life these past of couple years that have made him realize, as he puts it, “adults are just kids a little bit older.” When he returned to New York from Los Angeles this summer, it wasn't to his childhood apartment or to a borrowed living space of an acquaintance.

“But I think if people saw what my apartment looked like, they'd be like, ‘Oh.

This kid has no fucking clue what he's doing.’ ” He is so young and he is so old?

He knew he was as good as anyone at playing other people, even if he was still figuring out how to play himself.

We spent a good amount of time in Woodstock and in New York City and on the phone talking about where his career might take him from here.

That said, he's wise enough to know that his career could pivot in an entirely different direction—that the world could change or the opportunities could dry up or “eventually there's gonna be an Oscar Isaac in his 30s who's gonna bust out of Juilliard who's gonna be the next great actor and make me feel like a piece of shit.

He told me, “If I get hit by a truck next week, I'm looking at 20 to 23, I don't know if you can top that.” To show up with Call Me by Your Name—he knows that that film was a unicorn, the sort an actor works his whole life to find.

“I'm not gonna be bashing my head against a wall trying to prove that I'm an actor,” he said.

Lately, he's thought about this next phase as shining a flashlight into the dark.

I told him that one of the things that seemed to differentiate him from young stars of the past, and perhaps was a feature of his generation, was the way that material possessions didn't consume him.

All the things that one would expect to happen had happened in the first two and a half years since the arrival of a comet, and yet he was suspicious of so much of it

Some of these searching things he said to me could be mistaken as a person spinning out a little

“Maybe I'll never do a great work of art again, but I just feel like I'm confident in the way I'm trying to approach things now, how I'm setting up the angles,” he said on that porch in Woodstock

When you think about what Joel Coen said about the rapidness of the art, I'm just like: Trust the beat of your own drum