The embarrassing audition that still haunts Timothée Chalamet to this day: “Way off tonally”
Every actor seems to have a story about a bad audition that they can’t quite forget. It’s just part and parcel of being a Hollywood star, though – you’re never going to strike gold every time.
Just look at Sandra Bullock, who is haunted by her audition for the movie Mixed Nuts from 1994. She once revealed, “I was so bad, I walked in with a pillow in my shirt, and I knocked over everything, and I kept having to stop, and I looked at these people just saying, ‘Shoot me, have me leave, don’t make me do this again.’ It was the worst audition I ever had. It was horrible. It was so bad. And I hope it’s not on tape somewhere, it’s horrible.”
Despite this, she has since gone on to win an Oscar, so it’s not as though this terrible audition really meant much in the grand scheme of things. Countless actors can say the same. Awful auditions have been followed by parts that have landed them prestigious accolades, leaving the days of embarrassing test videos and awkward encounters with casting agents far behind them.
Timothée Chalamet is another perfect example of this. To date, he has three ‘Best Actor’ Oscar nominations to his name, despite being just 30 years old, with his legacy as one of the biggest stars and most acclaimed actors of his generation firmly secured, yet he still cringes at a bad audition video that he knows is out there, somewhere.
To be fair, the actor has a lot of embarrassing videos of him floating around the internet, so what’s one more… From his high school rap video to clips of him performing a Nicki Minaj cover in a pink wig, dancing and rapping in front of his whole school, the internet has lapped up these old clips, even finding an old account in which a young Chalamet shares his modded Xbox controllers. Nothing gets past the most dedicated superfans.
It’s a surprise, then, that no one has found Chalamet’s audition for the A&E series Bates Motel, which he did when he was a teenager. He was interested in playing the leading role, which would go to Freddie Highmore, who played the young Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho with chilling precision. Chalamet didn’t quite understand what he was auditioning for, though.
Instead, the young actor completely misinterpreted the job. “There is an audition floating around somewhere that I did for Bates Motel,” he told Backstage. “I did it when I was 14 or 15, and I was told this was a young Psycho. And I went to Netflix, and the first thing that came up for ‘psycho’ was American Psycho, which is obviously very specific tonally and performance-wise.”
It’s pretty hilarious to imagine Chalamet trying to do an impression of a young Patrick Bateman while auditioning for Bates Motel – something that was completely different. “So there’s an audition for Bates Motel somewhere that’s a Patrick Bateman impression that’s way off tonally,” he added.
Clearly, Chalamet wasn’t right for the role if he didn’t even know it was related to Hitchcock’s classic film… He’s come a long way since then, though, so he needn’t worry about the audition embarrassing him that much.
