Hollywood film stars are rarely known for their humility, but even his fellow actors were shocked at what Timothee Chalamet had to say when he accepted the Best Actor award for playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown at this year’s Screen Actors Guild Awards.
‘I know we’re in a subjective business, but the truth is I’m really in pursuit of greatness,’ he said, dressed in a black leather suit in honour of the musician – hardly Mr Modest himself – he is said to have spent six years preparing to play.
Was he being insufferably arrogant or endearingly honest? Fans on social media, where the actor’s young and mainly female admirers feverishly discuss even the most trivial developments in his short but meteoric career, were fiercely divided.
Chalamet – who celebrates his 30th birthday today – has played everyone from Willy Wonka to Henry V, not to mention the messianic hero in the two Dune sci-fi films and, of course, Dylan. Some hail him as the new Leonardo DiCaprio or Tom Cruise, and Hollywood bible Variety predicted as long ago as 2019 that he could become ‘the biggest movie star of his generation’.
But others wonder about his shelf life. Do his pretty boy, almost androgynous looks and his woke, TikTok-friendly image suggest the Chalamet craze will flicker and die, and his fickle Gen Z audience will soon find a new object for their obsession? After all, being the ‘internet’s boyfriend’ – as Chalamet has been dubbed – makes him vulnerable to being dumped when someone even more swoonsome comes along.
Whatever one thinks of him, it’s almost impossible to avoid ‘Timmy’, as he sometimes calls himself, at the moment.
For a start, he is currently everywhere promoting his new film, Marty Supreme, which opened in UK cinemas yesterday – and for which he’s received his best reviews yet. It’s a tale of ambition, perseverance and shameless showmanship in the high-octane, kill-or-be-killed world of… competitive table tennis.
Chalamet’s character, aspiring champion Marty Mauser, is loosely based on Martin Reisman, the talented but conceited son of a New York cab driver who became a national champion of a sport that Americans patronisingly insist on calling ping-pong.
Timothee Chalamet’s character in his upcoming film Marty Supreme, aspiring champion Marty Mauser, is loosely based on Martin Reisman, a national ping-pong champion
Chalamet and girlfriend Kylie Jenner attend the premiere of Marty Supreme in Los Angeles, California, earlier this month
In a recent interview for Vogue, Chalamet described him as ‘a shameless, entitled, arrogant, selfish and juvenile Wheaties box aspirant’ (Wheaties is a US breakfast cereal that features sporting champions on the box).
Unhelpfully, perhaps, for Chalamet’s standing, various people – including the film’s director – have remarked how close his personality is to Mauser’s.
The actor himself even admitted to Vogue that he has never played anyone so much like himself, or at least – he clarified – the person he was before he became a successful actor. It sounded like a typically honest remark from a young man who has charmed audiences with stories about his determination to become a serious actor after, aged 12, seeing Heath Ledger play the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed 2008 film The Dark Knight.
He has also described his joy and gratitude at getting his breakout role just nine years later in the 2017 romantic drama Call Me By Your Name.
The latter, in which he played a shy 17-year-old who has his first love affair with a significantly older man played by Armie Hammer, was condemned by some for what they saw as its creepy celebration of a grown man having sex with a young-looking and, in the US, underage boy.
But it was lavished with praise by critics and earned Chalamet his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor, making him the third- youngest nominee for the gong.
Over the next two years he continued to avoid mainstream cinema, preferring to give more sensitive, nuanced performances in independent films as droopy young men such as Saoirse Ronan’s love interest in the 2017 comedy drama Lady Bird and a troubled teenage drug addict in 2018 drama Beautiful Boy.
After the paparazzi snapped him, thin as a rake in his swimming trunks, kissing his then girlfriend Lily-Rose Depp, the actress daughter of Johnny, on a boat in Capri in 2019, he was hailed as a new kind of Hollywood leading man.
Not so much a heartthrob as an ‘artthrob’, an actor whose emotional vulnerability, feminism and gender-fluid fashion were – at least as far as young Gen-Zers were concerned – preferable to the traditional macho male.
In the same year, Vogue named Chalamet, whose ’fashion forward’ wardrobe is heavily influenced by the rap stars he loves, the ‘most influential man in fashion’ and praised his ability to ‘ply the boundary between traditional masculinity and femininity’.
Three years later, he became the first man to appear alone on the cover of British Vogue – not bad for someone who chooses his own clothes rather than relying on a stylist. In recent years he has struck out into more typically Hollywood territory – clanking around in chain-mail as Shakespeare’s Henry V in The King (2019) or knife-fighting his way through over-padded extra-terrestrial villains in Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024) – but he’s still largely maintained his reputation as the thinking young woman’s leading man.
Until now, that is. Judging by the online chatter, his halo has slipped a bit among some fans who are asking if his soft, sensitive persona isn’t all, well, just a bit of an act. For a start, there’s been the intense speculation, which started earlier this year, that Chalamet has been masquerading as a popular Liverpudlian rapper calling himself EsDeeKid.
The singer, who always covers his face in a mask or balaclava but whose eyes look distinctly like Chalamet’s, released a debut album in June and recently notched up his first Top 10 hit.
Chalamet, a native New Yorker who adores rap music and used to perform it in school under the moniker Lil Timmy Tim, has refused to deny he and EsDeeKid are one and the same. But a video released this week appears to show EsDeeKid and Chalamet rapping together in a kitchen.
On the remix of the track 4 Raws, Chalamet is seen talking about ‘model bitches in Peckham’ and how ‘my d*** is young and restless’. It could, however, be fake. And Chalamet’s choice of girlfriend has also puzzled – not to say disappointed – some of his followers.
Since 2023, he has been in a relationship with socialite and reality TV star Kylie Jenner, sister of Kim and part of the ruthlessly self-promoting Kardashian family.
Chalamet won the Best Actor award for playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown at this year’s Screen Actors Guild Awards
Chalamet with Armie Hammer in his breakout role in the 2017 romantic drama Call Me By Your Name
Chalamet and Ms Jenner have been in a relationship since 2023
Jenner, 28, is worth $670million (£500million) due to the success of her business Kylie Cosmetics, and Chalamet devotees will hardly have been reassured by a report last week that their pin-up has been ‘Kardashianised’ by a family who have instilled in him the necessity of building up his ‘persona brand’.
It’s certainly not what they may have expected from the ‘homme serieux’, recently described by one professional associate as ‘an actor with a capital A’.
Tacky but undeniably financially astute, the Kardashians are reportedly instrumental in Chalamet’s current over-the-top campaign to promote Marty Supreme, which he co-produced. The film’s backers have even been flying a bright orange promotional airship over Marty Supreme screenings for Oscar nominee selectors.
For Chalamet is not just trying to get people into cinemas to see it, he’s also desperate to win an Academy Award. (He received his second nomination for Best Actor earlier this year for his turn as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown but lost out to Adrien Brody for his role in The Brutalist.)
Some of his recent remarks about his own performance in Marty Supreme and its Oscars chances are, according to Variety, ‘raising eyebrows in Hollywood’ and drawing accusations that he’s taking it for granted that he’ll win this time round.
He bragged to a reporter that Marty Supreme marked his best acting role yet, coming as it did after a string of ‘really committed, top-of-the-line performances’ over the past ‘seven, eight years’.
People shouldn’t take his discipline and work ethic ‘for granted’, he warned, adding: ‘This is really some top-level s**t.’
Chalamet, who boasted to Vogue last month that ‘my superpower is my fearlessness – that’s the feedback I’ve gotten since I was a kid’, is displaying the sort of nauseating cockiness, mutter film insiders, that could be his undoing.
In Marty Supreme, his character Mauser campaigns to substitute traditional white table tennis balls with more visible orange ones – hence the tangerine theme of Chalamet’s relentless marketing efforts for the film.
They have included appearing at screenings and on chat shows surrounded by men with giant orange balls for heads, and persuading Kylie Jenner to join him in wearing all-orange outfits at the film’s Los Angeles premiere earlier this month.
He has also looped in A-listers such as Tom Brady, Hailey Beiber and Kendall Jenner to wear his now-viral £250 Marty Supreme-branded windbreaker jackets in support of the film. When a pop-up store in London stocking the jackets opened last week, fights broke out among hundreds of fans who had queued for hours, prompting the police to be called.
‘Some of it’s quite fun but it all seems just a little desperate,’ observed one Hollywood source to the Daily Mail.
Chalamet has also been talking up his film by stressing how much work he put into it. He claims to have spent six years working with a table tennis coach to hone his ping-pong skills. ‘They got me to a level where I could make it look good and precise,’ he boasted.
He showed a similar level of dedication in his preparation for the role of Dylan, going from a novice guitar player with two chords to – in the words of his teacher – ‘Dylan 2.0’.
Chalamet and Ms Jenner at the Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, California, earlier this year
It’s just the sort of method-acting behaviour that explains why he lionises such ‘method’ icons as Marlon Brando and Daniel Day-Lewis. He cited both as his chief role models in his SAG Awards speech on ‘pursuing greatness’.
And in a now-famous 2022 interview, he responded to a question on his own destiny by quoting the poet William Ernest Henley: ‘You can be the master of your fate and you can be the captain of your soul but you have to realise that life is coming from you and not at you. And that takes time.’
The single-minded Chalamet has always had his sights set on the top, but he originally harboured ambitions of making it in sport. The son of a French journalist father and estate agent and former dancer mother, he was a keen basketball player as a boy.
After switching his focus to acting, he won a place at New York’s celebrated LaGuardia High School, a specialist art and performing arts academy that inspired the film Fame. There, he went out with Madonna’s daughter, Lourdes, for a year.
He then won a place at New York’s Columbia University studying social anthropology and has since – in a rare admission of weakness – admitted he wasn’t up to the Ivy League institution academically and left after a year.
Chalamet transferred to New York University but again cut his studies short, this time to pursue his acting career. He didn’t, however, leave without causing some controversy, reputedly cutting a swathe through the female student population.
Apparently not remotely bothered by people who complain that success has gone to his head, Chalamet recently admitted that he was already fretting that the clock is ticking for him.
‘I’m about to be 30,’ he told an interviewer this month. ‘I want to look back on my interviews when I’m fried and mentally anguished in my sixties and say, “Man, I was really speaking the truth and not afraid of the truth”.’
Does the ‘greatness’ he says he pursues really await or will he become only the latest bright young Hollywood hope to fail to live up to his own not inconsiderable opinion of his talents?
