By
Jonathan Shia
Photography by
Richard Gilligan

Styling by John Colver at ArtList. Grooming by Nate Rosenkranz at Honey Artists.

TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET


It can often feel as if the media—present company included—is obsessed with finding the Next Big Thing, endlessly churning through pools of talent to find another Jennifer Lawrence, Lorde, or LeBron James. This compulsion can seem especially prevalent in the film industry, with countless Young Hollywood portfolios, lists of Sundance breakout stars, and the passionate scrutiny of the unknown names cast for minor roles in blockbuster productions. But Timothée Chalamet—who, with Homeland, Interstellar, and, now, the lead role in the Oscar- and Tony-winning writer John Patrick Shanley’s latest play on his CV at just twenty, knows of which he speaks—is having none of it. “There’s a lot of excitement around young actors, but the key word is excitement,” he says. “That excitement makes people think about what can become of them, but there’s not a lot of desire to make them established.”

Chalamet readily admits that he is “nowhere near established,” but nearly fifteen years in the industry have set him firmly on the path there. The New York native first found his way before a camera very early, but he is careful to distinguish his childhood forays from his current vocation. “I’ve been acting since I was five, but I never really took it that seriously,” he explains. “I think it’s healthy to see it that way at a young age. I mean, you’re not really doing anything except smiling as big as you can. Then when I was thirteen, I got into LaGuardia, which is a performing arts high school in New York, and there I saw how seriously it should be taken—not for the sake of being serious, but it is a craft. It’s something to be respected and, most importantly, it’s something that can be worked on.”

Thanks to his youthful endeavors, he already had an agent when he started at LaGuardia—something he is quick to say he was “really lucky about”—but he spent his first two years there focusing on learning. “I didn’t work professionally, and that was healthy, to get all the smile-as-big-as-you-can habits smashed out of me,” he laughs, “and to get rid of all my little tricks and to realize how to actually act and be real and truthful.”

In his junior year, with the help of that agent, he landed a four-episode stint on USA’s medical comedy Royal Pains. He would go on to miss nearly half of his senior year after he joined the cast of Homeland in its second season, playing Finn Walden, the son of the vice president and the love interest of the daughter of Damian Lewis’s Nicholas Brody. “It was only supposed to be one episode, and then it turned into two episodes, and then it turned into four and into eight. If you’ve seen it, I took a wild turn at one point,” he says, referring to a deadly accident Finn causes and tries to hush up. “The twist took me by surprise too.”

Chalamet says that he hadn’t seen Homeland before he began filming, a situation that, as a budding teenage actor, left him somewhat conflicted. “The ‘artist’ in me is like, ‘Yeah, you got to watch it to know what the tone of the show is and the style and what it’s talking about,’” he laughs, “but then the nervous, naïve, little actor in me is like, ‘I don’t want to psyche myself out.’”

Still, he says he wasn’t able to completely block out the pressure that inevitably came with joining, as an adolescent, what was then one of the most talked about television shows. “The thing I kept hearing from everyone was, ‘Everyone in show business watches your show, so this will help you get your next job or whatever,’ and I don’t think that was the right thing to hear at sixteen,” he reasons. “Maybe it should have been like, ‘Enjoy.’ But you can only learn through experience, so I’ve been better about that now. When I work on something now, I’m much better about putting earplugs in my ears and just enjoying the experience for what it is.”

That growth would come in handy soon after Chalamet graduated, when he spent his summer filming Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. He played Tom, Matthew McConaughey’s son (played by Casey Affleck as an adult), and says that he was near-ecstatic about the opportunity to work with Nolan, whom he calls “the director of my generation” and an important influence in his young life. “I saw The Dark Knight when I was thirteen, before I applied for LaGuardia, and Heath Ledger made me want to act,” he adds. “I know it’s cheesy and not as sophisticated as saying I watched Citizen Kane and that made me want to embrace the art of filmmaking, but that was the movie of my generation, so to get to work on [Interstellar], there was the element of, I want to be here for all the right reasons.”

Chalamet’s excitement was only intensified—as it turns out, erroneously—after he found out a little more about the project. “When I got the part and found out it was for a movie called Interstellar, I Googled it online and there was an earlier script that Steven Spielberg was supposed to direct about a father and his son, so I read that and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m the son in this movie, this is amazing, I’ll be Matthew McConaughey’s son, and this movie is about us,’” he laughs. “I didn’t know Nolan had switched it to a father and his daughter, but that was my favorite thing I’ve ever worked on.”

He eventually realized his mistake, but recalls that the secrecy around the film was so strict that it wasn’t until he arrived on set that he learned the full scope of the plot. “They let me read the whole script the first day in the trailer,” he laughs, “with a security guard outside.”

All clothing by Paul Smith.

After the summer of Interstellar, Chalamet returned to New York to begin classes at Columbia, where he found out that it was impossible to balance academics with his acting career, and decided to focus on the latter. The next year, he played brother to Kiernan Shipka in the supernatural indie One & Two and son of Ed Helms in the Christmas ensemble film Love the Coopers, both of which came out in the second half of 2015, but he has lately turned his attention to the stage, taking the title role in Shanley’s Prodigal Son, which opened at Manhattan Theatre Club yesterday. “It’s been kicking my ass, but in the best way possible,” he says of the run, with its eight- and even nine-show weeks. “There are some days when I go home, especially during the rehearsal process, and I’m like, ‘Wow, this is really hard,’ but the lower the lows, the higher the highs. When I have those days where I feel like everything clicks, it’s the most exceptional feeling in the world. The ups and downs are crazy, but it feels like every muscle is being used on stage.”

In the autobiographical play, Chalamet plays a thinly veiled version of Shanley, a Bronx boy experiencing a life-altering two years at a private high school in New Hampshire, where he stands out and demonstrates both terrific talents and a risky lack of restraint, all with an insouciant charm. Chalamet says that what attracted him to the role was its surprising depth when compared to most high school parts he has read. “This is a real teenager’s story—this is my story,” he enthuses. “It really feels like that. When I went there the last time to see Shanley, he said, ‘Why do you want to do this play?’ and I said, ‘It fucking speaks to me.’ I’ve always had that smaller guy’s mentality, and I fought my entire life and tried to assimilate more, but this is like a mental exercise that I get to be this guy and people are watching. I feel like it serves a purpose and my me-vs.-the-world mentality is not just dragging me down like I usually feel. In fact, it’s being put to some good use.”

Chalamet admits that he wouldn’t have felt up to the expectations of the part if not for the fact that he made it through a rigorous audition process encompassing New York, Los Angeles, and London, and that serving as the youthful avatar of the man who is both writing and directing has its conditions. “There’s a creative, collaborative process that definitely exists in this, but sometimes [Shanley] comes over and says, ‘No, I didn’t do that,’” he laughs. “Can’t fight that!”

He says that he has spent the little free time he has had during the play’s run reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Homer, and Lord Byron—all authors who are mentioned in Prodigal Son. “[The play] gave me a good excuse to read these great works of literature,” he says. “It’s not like at Columbia, where I felt like I was another product on the factory line. I feel like one of the geniuses of my time wrote a part for me that I have to read the books for it to make sense.”

Later this year, Chalamet will appear as the lead in both Miss Stevens, playing a depressive, bipolar high school student with a surprising talent for acting, opposite Lily Rabe, and Hot Summer Nights, a riff on the “classic American summer movie” also starring Thomas Jane and Brooklyn’s Emory Cohen. As in Prodigal Son, he returns to his adolescence for both, even considering that he has just barely left it. “It gives me a little more perspective,” he says of playing teenage roles as a newly minted twenty-year-old. “There’s something really heart-wrenching when you’re playing those roles at that age. It’s weird to make out with a girl on Homeland when you’ve only made out with a couple girls in real life. It feels like you’re really ripping your heart open. I have a little more perspective and awareness now.”

He predicts a return to the movies for himself soon, but he says that, until then, he is relishing the opportunity to play a major, complex role in a project that feels intensely intimate and personal. “I could have done, and probably will do, something that will take a month, two months to shoot. It wouldn’t be really challenging in an artistic sense, and then I’d spend six months going around promoting it, going around the world answering the same questions about a movie that I didn’t really have any creative say in creating and plugging talking points given by some higher-up. Or I could be working with one of the geniuses of our time. I have to get up on the nights when I feel like I don’t have it in me and find a way to wrench it out of me and get through the nights when it feels amazing. The story is so emotional and it hits so close to home. I was living in the Bronx last year and I was losing my mind, and I get to exorcise those demons every night.”

Prodigal Son runs through March 27 at Manhattan Theatre Club. See this feature, plus many more, in print by preordering TLM16 here.

By
Jonathan Shia
Photography by
Richard Gilligan

Styling by John Colver at ArtList. Grooming by Nate Rosenkranz at Honey Artists.

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