The new DiCaprio? How Timothée Chalamet became the biggest star on the planet

How did the adolescent squirt humiliated by Ansel Elgort in his first film turn into the most feted young screen actor of his generation? Timothée Chalamet was just 16 when he worked on Men, Women & Children (2014), Jason Reitman’s movie about American families so obsessed with their online lives that they’ve forgotten how to communicate properly. This was Chalamet’s first foray onto the big screen. Many of his scenes ended on the cutting room floor. Elgort was clearly the name the producers were banking on to appeal to the teen audience.

Yet despite that inauspicious beginning, Chalamet today is among the most highly sought-after stars in Hollywood. Last weekend, the 27-year-old hosted the US sketch comedy institution Saturday Night Live for the second time. He was recently on the cover of GQ magazine for the third time in six years. His new movie, the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory origin story Wonka, directed by Paddington’s Paul King, is tracking to be a major box office hit over Christmas. Dune: Part Two, out in March, is expected to be a huge money spinner as well. He’ll even be seen shortly as folk troubadour Bob Dylan in a new biopic.

Everyone seems to love him, from his teen fans – Chalamaniacs, as they call themselves – to the broadsheet critics who’ve rhapsodised over his performances in offbeat films like Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017) and the romantic cannibal road movie Bones and All (2022). It’s all left him in an unlikely position: an arthouse darling, and an emerging action star (according to GQ, his stunt trainers for Dune: Part Two previously worked with Tom Cruise).

Every move in Chalamet’s private life is scrutinised intently by the gossip columnists. At the moment they are in a frenzy over his rumoured relationship with make-up mogul and Kardashian spawn Kylie Jenner, and yet all this tabloid noise hasn’t yet made him a figure of ridicule. He is still taken seriously as an actor.

Commenting on his meteoric rise, collaborators point to his bold approach to work. He is ready to take roles that actors more worried about their public image wouldn’t touch. “I think his genius lies in his fearlessness,” Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen told the US press after casting him as Steve Carrell’s drug-addicted son Nic in heartbreaking drama Beautiful Boy (2018). “But I also think that nobody can pull off that sort of risk-taking if they are not extremely gifted and talented in the way Timmy is.” Van Groeningen also pointed to the young actor’s charm: “He can turn on a dime into this volatile guy strung out on drugs and sort of losing it. At the same time, you can see a part of Nic – this character who is aware of what’s happening, what he’s doing, how he is possessed by this drug – peering through.” The actor later acknowledged that Beautiful Boy had been the most gruelling experience of his career. Yet, he played the young crystal meth addict with pathos and delicacy.

Chalamet has a strange Zelig-like quality. He pops up unexpectedly in very different kinds of movies. The New York-born actor from New York’s Hell’s Kitchen made a decent stab at playing Prince Hal in David Michod’s historical epic The King (2019). At the end of the film, Hal is shown on the battlefield, leading his men as they charge the enemy, swords flashing. He ends up writhing in the mud, corpses all around him.

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The setting couldn’t be further away from the sunny Tuscany depicted in Call Me by Your Name, the film that established him as a star. He was cast there as precocious 17-year-old Elio, who has a gay affair with his father’s research student (Armie Hammer). As soon as the queer love story screened in Sundance in 2017, it was clear that Chalamet was going to have a major career. He had a combination of arrogance, vulnerability and mischief that immediately enraptured audiences. Look at him also in Greta Gerwig’s critics’ favourite, Lady Bird (2017), his charismatic rebel with a quiff turning out to not be as profound as he initially seems. He also co-starred in Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) and she has raved in interviews about everything from his sense of style to his “handsome but beautiful looks”.

Off screen, the young actor is a contradictory figure. He is keen to boast about his tough, mean-streets background. “I take an inordinate amount of baseless pride in the fact that I am from New York,” he said in a 2019 interview, sounding as if he was a mini-Pacino. His grandparents on his mother’s side are from the Bronx, but had Russian roots. His father is from France and he himself is fluent in French. Perhaps this explains why he is equally comfortable working with a maverick European director like Guadagnino as he is appearing in a studio blockbuster like Dune. He is very bright but also highly disciplined – he has long said he’s determined to stay on the rails. “You look at the road map for young male actors and it’s not great,” he reflected in a 2017 podcast with Josh Horowitz. Many seem to self-destruct.

Chalamet was already a professional actor when he was in high school, appearing in the acclaimed terrorist drama Homeland. He briefly attended Columbia University (reportedly on the advice of Homeland co-star Claire Danes), but dropped out to concentrate on his stage and screen career. Although Christopher Nolan cast him in a small part in Interstellar (2014), there were plenty of roles in bigger-budget movies he auditioned for unsuccessfully. Aged 19, he came very close to playing Spider-Man, eventually losing the role to Tom Holland. At the time he was “torn up” about missing such a big break. However, he later acknowledged that working with Guadagnino rather than Marvel gave him a creative freedom that he would never have enjoyed as the face of a superhero franchise.

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Chalamet may be drawn to offbeat projects, but he is also adamant that they must engage audiences; he’s been dismissive of “pretentious” art house movies that take themselves too seriously. “What is worse than being bad is being boring,” he told Horowitz. “I cannot stand that. I really don’t want to be acting in a vacuum.”

Now 27, the actor is going through a transition. As he archly informed GQ, he is “adultifying”. He is also breaking new ground. Wonka sees him singing. Director Paul King told Total Film that Chalamet sounded just like Bing Crosby. “There’s quite a range, because it does go from a couple of bigger, showstopper-y sort of things, to moments of real, pure emotion and he can do it all,” he said.

Chalamet’s range is already immense. He can play dapper matinee idol types and tormented loners equally effectively. It’s as if he has a bit of both Cary Grant and Marlon Brando in his make-up. In Bones and All, he somehow made a young cannibal seem like a romantic hero. Now, audiences will see him acting opposite Hugh Grant’s Oompa Loompa in Wonka. In his shabby top hat and colourful but ragged-looking tails, his Wonka looks like the Artful Dodger. The film portrays the character before he becomes the Elon Musk-like chocolate factory owner and inventor that everyone remembers from Dahl’s novel or the 1971 Gene Wilder version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

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After the lengthy Screen Actors Guild strike, which saw Hollywood stars locked out of sight for four months, Chalamet was among the first actors out of the traps. Days after the strike ended, he was hosting Saturday Night Live and we can expect a media blitz of Chalamet interviews in the coming months as he promotes Wonka, the second Dune movie and the perfume ad he has just shot with Martin Scorsese.

“Now the strike is over, we can all return to this magical world where actors can once again talk about their projects,” he said in his opening monologue during last weekend’s SNL, before breaking into song: “Come with me and you’ll be in a world of shameless self-promotion.”

It was another consummate performance from the star: witty, self-deprecating, but still showy in its own sly way. It suggests that he has comedic talents that might well be tapped in future movies. Generally, when actors rise this far and this fast, their wings are soon burnt and they plummet, Icarus-like, back down toward the earth. Chalamet, though, has an uncanny ability to keep airborne. Just when audiences think they have a handle on him, he will soar off in yet another direction, taking a role that surprises us all over again.

‘Wonka’ is in cinemas from 8 December