Timothée Chalamet’s favourite movie of all time: “I couldn’t tell where the filmmaking was”
Since the release of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, Timothée Chalamet has undisputedly reigned as his generation’s actor of the moment. Like Leonardo DiCaprio circa 1996, Chalamet has built up the adoration of a wide scope of fans who admire both his impressive acting skills and floppy hair.
His performance in Call Me By Your Name, playing the young teenager Elio who experiences an intense first love when he meets the 24-year-old Oliver, earned him his first Oscar nomination. Chalamet quickly rose to acclaim, and with his role in the Oscar-nominated Lady Bird coming that same year, his presence on screen was unavoidable.
It was only a matter of time before the actor found himself in even more high-profile roles, leading the moving addiction drama Beautiful Boy in 2018 and appearing in the likes of Little Women, The French Dispatch, and, of course, Dune. Chalamet practically guarantees success at the box office, and over the past decade, he has shapeshifted into everyone from Willy Wonka to Bob Dylan.
With a mixture of commercially successful hits like Dune sitting alongside slightly more daring choices, such as the cannibal romance Bones and All, Chalamet has shown himself to be an actor who deeply cares about cinema. From the beginning of his career, he has worked with well-established or indie directors, appearing in movies like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Julia Hart’s Miss Stevens, reflecting his interest in artful storytelling.
It makes sense, then, that Chalamet once revealed his favourite movie to be the lowkey drama James White, starring Christopher Abbott and Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon. In conversation with filmmaker Xavier Dolan (via VMan), Chalamet explained: “My favourite movie is James White by Josh Mond, and it’s a testament to the filmmaking that I couldn’t tell where the filmmaking was. It felt like watching a man’s journey. Josh has his finger on what it is to be alive now.”
He added, “You keep seeing stories told with similar tropes, and that, as a viewer, is what’s scariest to me. I’m not worried about being bad in anything, because I know I’ll be bad in things, and that’s fine. But what scares me is being boring, and being part of stories I feel too familiar with, or being cynical for the sake of being cynical.”
Additionally, the film starred Scott Mescudi, better known as Kid Cudi, who worked on curating the soundtrack, while Ron Livingston and Scott Cohen also appeared. James White follows the titular character as he reckons with his terminally ill mother’s impending death, struggling to grapple with this grief while trying to navigate his 20s. Messy and troubled, James finds it hard to balance various aspects of his life, and Mond pulled from his own experience of losing his mother when writing the script.
The indie film received widespread acclaim, and it seems as though it resonated deeply with Chalamet when he first saw it. James White isn’t an easy watch by any means, but it’s this quest to show the difficulties of the human experience with a raw and vulnerable sensibility that deeply inspired the young actor.
