The “explicit” 2003 album Timothée Chalamet begged his mother to buy: “Thanks, mom!”
No actor in history has a completely unblemished record, no matter how talented they are. De Niro, Pacino, Brando, Streep, Hepburn, they all had the occasional stinker to go with the triumphs, and so far Timothée Chalamet is on exactly the same trajectory.
I mention him in the same breath not because I’m particularly a fan (I’m not) but because due to sheer confidence in his own talent, or the arrogance of youth, or to be fair to him, what he produced with Marty Supreme, Chalamet definitely sees himself as the heir to some of those classic actors, and he’s doing all he can to emulate them.
He has openly suggested that he is in pursuit of greatness, and that he sees acting prowess in much the same way as sporting supremacy, putting Brando alongside towering figures like Michael Jordan and Olympic summer Michael Phelps.
And to give Chalamet his due, at the age of 30 he became the youngest actor in history to collect three Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Actor’, the first in fact since Brando did it in the 1950s. So he’s pretty much on track, even if he has made Wonka, which was absolutely abysmal, and even if he made the 2024 Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, which many people thought he was great in, but in which he actually just sat looking moody on a motorbike and slammed some doors occasionally.
Music biopics aren’t easy, though, much as they are undeniable Oscar-bait, and especially not when Monica Barbaro is overshadowing you with the kind of performance she did as Joan Baez in that film. Nevertheless, not everyone agrees with me, which is more than understandable, especially when Dylan himself said he liked Chalamet’s rendition, and the actor picked up not just an Academy Award nomination, but a Bafta and a Golden Globe one too.
Maybe the reason I’m not totally sold on Chalamet is because of his public appearances, which can be slightly erratic and sometimes just downright dislikeable. Some of those seem to be in order to show the world his love of rap music, albeit admittedly in a humorous fashion, like his SNL appearance for a “rap roundtable” alongside Pete Davidson, which prompted a lot of kids to say things like ‘yeet’ and ‘skrrt’ for a while.
And some clue as to where that all emerged from came when he was asked by W Magazine about the first album he ever bought, with Chalamet revealing: ”The first record I got was at Tower Records in New York, I was about seven or eight with my Mom, and I picked up 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. It had a parental advisory sticker on it, an explicit one, and I remember my sister chastising my Mom saying ‘are you going to let him get the explicit version?’”
He added: “To this day, thank you Mom, because there were explicit 50 Cent records playing in my bedroom from the ages of seven to nine. I have the best Mom in the world, I mean it.”
Meanwhile, this year is all about Dune 3 for Chalamet as the third instalment of Denis Villeneuve’s ‘lots of people arguing about spice while covered in sand’ sci-fi goes head to head with Avengers: Doomsday in the battle for Christmas bums on cinema seats. He’s also doing a Wonka 2, which is akin to someone getting gastroenteritis and then asking a doctor if they can have it again immediately afterwards.
