The co-star who made Timothée Chalamet raise his game: “I can’t overstate”
After his recent success with A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet professed that he was in pursuit of greatness, naming the likes of Viola Davis when describing the type of mastery he is aiming for. But while the actor might have been gunning for his first Academy Award win after his portrayal of Bob Dylan, greatness is built over time, and there are many actors of a similar calibre who found roles of a lifetime later on in their career.
The journey to greatness is not a linear road, something that Chalamet might have learnt through working with one other actor who had a vastly different route into the industry than he did.
There are many places to find inspiration in the world of Hollywood, bumping elbows with your biggest idols at dinner parties and seeing them plastered over the billboards of Los Angeles. But perhaps the biggest pinch-me moment comes when working alongside them, something that Chalamet has experienced many times after collaborating with everyone from Saoirse Ronan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Stellan Skarsgard and Zendaya.
However, there was one working relationship that was most influential to Chalamet and his outlook on the traditional Hollywood trajectory, sparking a realisation that came after crossing paths with Austin Butler.
Butler might have been a Disney actor as a teenager, but his work has spiralled into polar opposite territories since then, with a breakout role in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that changed everything for the actor and led to star-studded projects with Ari Aster, Baz Luhrmann and Denis Villeneuve.
While he might be undeniably great, his untraditional route shows that success can be reached at any time through a myriad of different paths. When discussing this, Chalamet highlighted the impact that Butler had on his perception of his craft after first meeting him at the cast reading for Dune: Part Two.
Apparently, even on that initial Zoom call, he was already taking in the voice of his character, saying, “No, here’s the thing, he was already talking like Stellan Skarsgård. And you could see everyone was, like… 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. But 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.”
Despite not coming from a traditional background like Chalamet, Butler is fearlessly carving out his own path and doing things his own way, even if it’s a little different to how others might approach it. Some might mock his intense commitment, but his work ethic is incredibly inspiring and shows that you don’t need to follow the same trajectory as everyone else and can still reach greatness in your own way, and encourage you to keep going.
