Timothée Chalamet on The King, Gen Z and being the world's most in-demand ‘artthrob’

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11th Oct 2019

Timothée Chalamet needs no introduction. The 23-year-old New York native, whose title role in Luca Gudagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017) escalated the actor to the upper echelons of Hollywood (and brought on a slew of films including Ladybird, Beautiful Boy and Little Women debuting later this year) has fast become one of the most in-demand young actors working today.

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Porcelain-skinned, just-unruly-enough mane and a preternatural understanding of his craft and of the screen have qualified Chalamet for bonafide stardom, catapulting him to the front of the minds of directors Greta Gerwig, Woody Allen, Wes Anderson and Australia’s own David Michôd.

Working with Michôd on The King, a period film loosely based on Shakespeare’s Henry V that sees Chalamet’s character, Hal, take to the throne reluctantly, the film includes many of Chalamet’s contemporaries (Robert Pattinson, Thomasin McKenzie, Lily-Rose Depp) and explores universal themes of war, power, privilege and wrestling with identity.

Following the Australian premiere of The King in Sydney on October 11 (which launches on Netflix on November 1), Chalamet sat down with Vogue to discuss his latest film, the costumes he wore to get into character, and stepping up into our responsibilities irrespective of our needs and wants both on and off-screen. 

“I’m working on things that are of interest and feel new and fresh. I just want to work on things that are good,” explains Chalamet about the projects he’s taken on to date, noting that he’s not necessarily conscious of the common thread of male exploration woven in his body of work so far. 

“As David [Michôd] said, his movies have dealt with – the contemporary way to put it would be a toxic masculinity and the trappings of male ego. The other movies [I’ve worked on] also explore male psychology,” he reflects, before adding more broadly “or human psychology.”

In the same breath, Chalamet notes that the rapport Michôd had established already with certain co-stars would have eased his nerves going into the film. “Thinking of David’s working relationship with Joel [Edgerton] and also Robert Pattinson and Ben Mendelsohn and a lot of people in the movie, [I’ve learned] how helpful it can be to have a working relationship with people, prior to the movie starting. It’s like any job; your day one is wracked with anxiety of like, ‘How am I coming off to people?’ or impressions like that.”

On the subject of impressions, Chalamet, who has straddled the worlds of Hollywood and high fashion with ease (most recently arriving on the red carpet in paint-splattered overalls made by artist-cum-designer Sterling Ruby and showing up in Sydney in a cobalt blue Haider Ackermann suit) reflects that he enjoyed the distance from fashion now in order to get into a character from the past. By embracing a departure from his regular rotation of Virgil Abloh-designed Louis Vuitton and Haider Ackermann, he was able to fully immerse himself in the film’s 15th century context.

“I wasn’t designing the costumes or choosing what was going to be worn, but the intent was to get what the period would have been like, as close to that as possible, and less to do with a stylistic take in a modern or wacky direction.”

And though the film is set centuries ago, Chalamet is well-aware that the onus on youth to take on responsibilities prematurely (be it fighting for climate change; gender equality) like his character has only become more pronounced, and more urgent. “I think the reason my generation speaks up so much is that simply, there’s so much to speak up about. The ways of the world, if hidden in secrecy before… [are now in plain sight].”

And, while Chalamet admits he’s been kept out of the loop of his new ‘artthrob’ status coined by the Internet, he now wears the badge with pride. “I’ve never heard that. Do you think it’s a good thing? If you think it’s a good thing, then yeah, it’s a good thing.”