The roles Timothée Chalamet was told he couldn’t play: “You don’t have the right body”
It seems hard to imagine a universe in which Timothée Chalamet isn’t an immediate success. After his breakout performance in Call Me By Your Name, a lush and striking coming-of-age story about doomed romance and first love, the actor quickly became one of the stars to watch and shortly found leading roles in Beautiful Boy, Lady Bird and Dune. Despite now being one of the most coveted and sought-after performers, Chalamet did not always believe that he would be accepted by Hollywood, particularly after some early comments about his appearance and the types of roles he wouldn’t be able to play.
With the inescapable buzz around Chalamet’s upcoming film, A Complete Unknown, the actor has been reflecting on his career to date and sharing his journey to success, something that seemed to happen suddenly and all at once. His role in Call Me By Your Name showed an incredibly emotional depth and sensitivity that led the film to become a pivotal piece of work within queer media, with the subject matter of the film being heavily debated due to the controversial age-gap relationship at the heart of it. Many film lovers speculated over his next choices and whether he would continue with independent projects or go down the studio route, with Chalamet even revealing some advice he received from Leonardo DiCaprio in which he told him to steer clear of “the superhero shit”.
But Chalamet successfully navigated these expectations by carving out a unique path for himself through his work with Greta Gerwig and Wes Anderson and another collaboration with Luca Guadagnino on the 2022 film Bones and All. However, in recent years, he has branched out to the world of commercial filmmaking through his portrayal of Willy Wonka and Paul Atreides, something that the actor never suspected he would be able to do after early assumptions made about his ability to portray certain characters.
When discussing this, Chalamet said, “The Maze Runner or Divergent — things of that variety that were popping when I was coming up — the feedback was always like, ‘Oh, you don’t have the right body. I had an agent that called me and said, ‘You got to put on weight,’ basically, not aggressively, but you know”.
The genre of adolescent action films is usually dominated by the same types of actors, something that these agents could not see working with Chalamet and his particular screen presence. While this would be discouraging for many emerging actors, this did not stop him from forging his own path and finding roles that feel as though they were made for him.
“I found my way into these very personalized movies,” Chalamet said. “For [Dylan], it was folk music … Those were smaller budget but very — I don’t know how else to put it — personable movies that started in this theater space. This is where I found my rhythm, my confidence, my flow, whatever you want to call it.”
I can’t imagine that Chalamet would regret the direction that his career took, as his choices have arguably been far more interesting than those of the action thriller genre, which is so incredibly oversaturated and predictable. Chalamet is also set to star in the Safdie Brothers’ upcoming project, marking a new era for the actor and further collaborations with some of cinema’s most exciting directors.
