Fresh from winning a gong at the Golden Globes, actor Timothée Chalamet is tipped to win Best Actor at the upcoming Oscars. He tells how years of preparation went into playing the ‘morally ambiguous’ character
Widely tipped for a best actor Oscar for his performance in Marty Supreme, like the character he plays, Timothée Chalamet is on course to achieve his dream. He beat Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney to a gong at the Golden Globes for best actor in a musical or comedy film, for his portrayal of hustler-turned table tennis ace Marty Mauser.
Describing the film, set in 1950s New York, in which Mauser – a young man in his 20s – goes to hell and back in his pursuit of greatness, Chalamet says: “It’s about dreaming big. It’s about a young dreamer in New York who dreams of being the greatest table tennis player of all time.
“And if that sounds like small stakes for a film, somehow, because of the amazing work of the director Josh Safdie and the cast, it becomes a metaphor for pursuing your dreams relentlessly in life. You know, when you’re in your early 20s and nobody believes in you, that’s a challenging thing to do.”
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Under intense public scrutiny since his breakthrough role in Call Me By Your Name in 2017, which earned Chalamet, then 22, an Oscar nomination for his role as 17-year-old Elio, he understands the pressures of trying to achieve your dreams young better than most people. Now 30 and professing in the past to feeling judged by social media, especially over his private life, he said at the 2022 Venice Film Festival: “To be young now, and to be young whenever – I can only speak for my generation – is to be intensely judged.”
As well as appealing to him because of its optimistic outlook, he feels Marty Supreme encapsulates the silliness of 20-something life. Chalamet, who has been linked to makeup mogul Kylie Jenner, 28, since 2023, says: “I like the optimistic tone that the movie strikes at a time when things are quite gloomy.
“Your dream is your dream in life and nobody can really tell you otherwise. The movie is equally about being an idiot in your 20s. Being a bowling ball and not necessarily having the best relationship with others.” Yet Chalamet felt challenged by Marty’s moral outlook.
He says: “That was one of the greatest challenges of this role – Marty is really morally ambiguous. The ethical lens of the film, and of Marty, is all over the place. It’s a selfishness pursuit.”
Chalamet, who grew up bilingual – with dual French and American citizenship, because of his American mother and French father, attended New York’s LaGuardia High School, followed by a brief stint at Columbia University. Before Call Me By Your Name, he appeared in Homeland in 2012 and Interstellar in 2014.
Since then, his major films include Beautiful Boy (2018), Little Women (2019). Dune (2021), Dune: Part Two (2024), Wonka (2023) and A Complete Unknown (2024) chronicling the early years of Bob Dylan. And he used Covid as an opportunity to simultaneously improve his skill playing both table tennis and the guitar, in preparation for his roles playing Mauser and Dylan.
Determined to make it look like he could play table tennis “to a high level,” he explains: “Like with the Dylan movie [for which he learned to play the guitar] the table tennis aficionados, I wanted them to not flinch when they saw the movie. Everyone has got a passion in life and when you see it represented on screen and it’s not accurate, you scoff. You almost feel offended.”
Some of the Marty Supreme table tennis shots actually imitated those played in real life. Chalamet says: “They were pulled from real history, from actual flashy players from 1950. That footage is online. That’s the famous ‘Reisman twirl.’ Marty Supreme was a project that first came together in 2018, that’s when we had our first meeting.
“Through Covid, I got rid of all the furniture I had in my apartment and put table tennis equipment there and had Josh [Safdie] come and play with me. He rolled an ankle – I was 23 years old and my apartment was dusty. I had loads of time to train in Covid. Then the big productions I was on had long dated schedules, like Dune, with days off in between, so I was able to carry on – learning the guitar and table tennis.”
A perfectionist, Chalamet painstakingly prepares for every role. He says: “You get one go at it. You prepare and prepare and prepare for a role and then you kind of abandon it all at the door and give your all to a scene. I’ll do whatever is demanded. I think this method acting thing can get a bad rap at times. I call it ‘method energy’. “I’m not trying to stay in character, but I avoid anything that might take away from it – keeping my phone off during films, or as much as I can.”
Chalamet, who made his Broadway debut back in 2016 in Prodigal Son and is known for portraying complex, emotional characters, tries not to be distracted from his work when he is playing a role. The New Yorker continues: “My focus is mostly on ‘how do I really make sure the real world doesn’t affect me on set? How do I loosely stay in the zone as much as possible?’”
He hugely appreciates how lucky he has been to land such unusual parts in some off-beat movies, that have gone on to be massive hits. He says: “Every shoot day is a precious thing. A movie like Marty Supreme – it’s a miracle that it gets made … a 1950s table tennis thriller! So, every day we’re on set, it’s a gratitude exercise that we get to work on something great. Especially at the moment, you know, with AI and all sorts of stuff.”
But while parallels can be drawn between the upward trajectory of Marty’s life and that of Chalamet’s, the actor’s attitude to any movie accolades – with the Oscars coming up in March – are, he professes, far from selfish. He says of the awards season: “Any association with that conversation is for the movie. I want the movie to get a lot of love. The awards stuff doesn’t matter.”
*Timothee Chalamet was speaking on The Arts Hour, broadcast on the BBC World Service.
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Source: Mirror
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