Timothee Chalamet covered this month’s issue of GQ, mostly to promote Dune 2 and some early promo for Wonka. The interview was conducted pre-strike, which is why the piece reads as “filled out” excessively by quotes from directors and producers, because GQ didn’t have time to ask Timmy follow-up questions during the strike. Chalamet is very good in this piece, he talks a lot about how much he’s “grown up” in the past three years, how much he admires his generational peers like Zendaya, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, etc, how he feels like he’s leveling up. Some highlights from GQ:
Pandemic life: “I had spent a lot of time after high school with my head in the clouds, imagining a life as an actor, and totally oblivious to the life I was actually leading,” he said. “I was out of touch with an in-touch life. And during COVID, it flipped, and I was forced to become very in touch with my increasingly out-of-touch life. It was not good for me.”
He’s 27 years old now: “You start going on Instagram, seeing people from your high school getting married, friends having kids, and you start going: This balls-to-the-wall thing, even at this amazing level I’m at that probably couldn’t have gone better—you still start wondering, How long till you have to change?”
Filming ‘Bones & All’ in middle-America in 2021: “It’s something I think about a lot with Dylan, that life rhythms are different. When you’re raised in the city, going stir-crazy during the pandemic, your life rhythm becomes agitated. And driving through the middle of the country listening to Townes Van Zandt, your life rhythm adjusts in a great way…I got my second jab in Cincinnati.”
The Armie Hammer story breaking as they prepped Bones & All: “I mean, what were the chances that we’re developing this thing?” Chalamet said, reflecting on that strange period. When false reports suggested the film was inspired by the news, “it made me feel like: Now I’ve really got to do this. Because this is actually based on a book.” Chalamet’s face went stiff when I asked him to describe how he personally experienced the allegations against Hammer. “I don’t know,” he said, reluctantly. “These things end up getting clickbaited so intensely. Disorienting is a good word.”
He’s obsessed with Austin Butler. “It started on Zoom, when we did a [Dune 2] cast reading.” Was Butler still talking like Elvis? I asked him. “No, here’s the thing, he was already talking like Stellan Skarsgård.” That is, on day one of the first read-through, Butler had already dialed his way all the way into the character, the heir to Skarsgård’s Baron Harkonnen. “And you could see everyone was, like…”—he laughed a little nervously—“I can’t overstate how inspiring it was to me personally. Because here was someone who’s a little older than me, but generationally we’re similar, and I don’t know how he would put it, but his journey was different than mine… he takes the work incredibly seriously. And I feel like I hadn’t seen that among someone my age, whether it was in drama school or on set, that did take the work that seriously but then after ‘cut’ wasn’t, you know, in some show of how seriously they took it—and instead is this tremendously affable, wonderful man.”
He’s also obsessed with Tom Cruise: “After I met Tom Cruise, right after finishing the first Dune, he sent me the most wonderfully inspiring email,” Chalamet said. It included a Rolodex of sorts of all the experts he might need for stunt training. A motorcycle coach. A helicopter coach. “He basically said, in Old Hollywood, you would be getting dance training and fight training, and nobody is going to hold you to that standard today. So it’s up to you. The email was really like a war cry.”
He loved ‘Top Gun: Maverick’: While filming Dune Part Two, in the summer and fall of 2022, Chalamet said he saw Top Gun: Maverick eight times. On one occasion, he bought out a movie theater in Budapest for two bucks a seat and took the whole cast and crew. “Top Gun was just hugely inspiring to me last summer when we were making Dune,” he said. “Some of the crew were kind of scoffing at going, but I just thought it was one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen.”
His romance with Kylie Jenner: “I can’t say that this stuff doesn’t matter because my intense fandom has led me to where I am.” But he also bristles at the suggestion that he might not be entitled to a wholly private life. When I told him that this is all a fair and practically inalienable right, but that if he really wanted to be left alone he might not spend time with one of the four most followed people on Instagram, he nodded and chuckled: “This reminds me of that recent South Park episode with the Worldwide Privacy Tour,” he said, referring to a send-up of Harry and Meghan flying around in a private jet and appearing on a talk show to demand: We want privacy! We want privacy! “Sometimes, people are going to be hella confused when you say you’re trying to live a private life.”
There’s something so charming about Timothee Chalamet meeting Austin Butler via Zoom for a Dune 2 reading and immediately becoming obsessed with Butler’s hyper-Method approach to the work. That’s my biggest takeaway – Timmy is like “omg, he’s more prepared than me and he’s my peer!” It stoked his competitive fires. Chalamet is also obsessed with Zendaya and her team too, but in a nicer, less competitive way – he just appreciates the way Zendaya rolls and he enjoys watching her navigate her stardom. As for the Kylie Jenner stuff… interesting that he name-checked that South Park episode. Hm.
Covers courtesy of GQ.
He had better watch himself with the Tom Cruise. Scientology loves to recruit big names.
lol that was my first thought too, Tommy is trying to get to the younger A listers to recruit. Leah Remini told a story years ago how Tom C brought in all the big name Scientologists and read them the riot act about how they have to start recruiting more actors. She said they gave her hell for years for not pulling in Kevin James. She also said she was heavily pregnant at the time and had to sit there for hours being yelled at by Tom. Why would anyone pay to be a part of this cult is beyond me.
This arrogance against scientology is really funny. So they believe in Xenu instead of God. Far more worse things have been done in the name of christianity than in the name of Xenu. But somehow Tom Cruise is evil because he´s been brainwashed by scientology instead of christianity.
oooh Pippa…. where to begin….
What is about this guy that just bugs the sh*t out of me? Is he as great as he thinks he is? Maybe I’m missing something – meh.
I feel the same.
I even liked him in Dune but I tend not to read/watch interviews as after a few lines he annoys me, for some reason.
I’ll never get what his sex appeal is.
I am……rather underwhelmed by him. Doesn’t help that I saw the trailer for Wonka; he does the character no favours at all. Wooden.
Someone is trying to get cast in”Top Gun – Geezer in Flight Remaking Same Movie Part 25”. 😂. I wonder if he saw the original which was basically the same movie. Maybe he is dying to do a shirtless beach volleyball scene.
Geezer in Flight should be the name of the next Marvel superhero movie.
I just read the entire interview. It’s actually really good. And I enjoyed the framing of it – of becoming an adult and the pangs of that transition. But also the possibilities and growth that spring from that transition.
Everyone seems to love working with Austin. Denzel Washington was so impressed when they worked together on Broadway that he personally made calls to help him out. So it sounds like he’s method but not a douche about it.
And yes they will be competing for similar roles.
He probably felt the need to defend Austin aswell, people are still making fun of him.
As of competing for similar roles, I don’t know how much work these two are going to get with Jacob Elordi around. He seems to be the whole package.
Top Gun 2 was not great, it was just a rehash of the first movie. Though it was great to see Val Kilmer on the screen. The studio was just smart to let it sit on a shelf for over two years waiting for the pandemic to die down. They hit the sweet spot of people being vaccinated and could go to a movie theatre for the first time in years. With the nostalgia of a beloved 80’s movie released over the Memorial Day holiday. It was lighting in a bottle.
Well, he only said it was the greatest movie HE’S ever seen – maybe he hasn’t seen too many movies.
Not liking this guy since the Hammas skit on SNL. Issa Rae declined participation in a skit she was uncomfortable with. SNL could have held space for Palestinians in the way they did for Ukrainians, where they stopped the jokes for a minute.
Loved the movie!
He’s so superficial in his choice of gfs but whatever. I think he’s a good actor but I’m over movies and will catch the Dune films when they’re on free to air.