“Although we are in a subjective business, the truth is that I seek greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats.” With the Screen Actors Guild award in hand for playing Bob Dylan in A complete stranger, In February 2025, Timothée Chalamet (New York, 30 years old) confessed to his fellow performers. The actor has never hidden his artistic ambition, his selection of projects has been refined with his experience, and now he is preparing to win his first Oscar award for his hustler Marty Mauser in Marty Supreme. Praised by his colleagues such as Javier Bardem, praised by its director, Josh Safdie, after seven years together to make the film, the Chalamet era in world cinema has arrived.
Only one other actor had achieved three Oscar nominations at the age of 30. And not just any one: Marlon Brando. Chalamet, who reached that age on December 27, now has four, so Call Me By Your Name (2017), A complete stranger (2024) and two, as protagonist and as producer, for Marty Supreme, which opens in Spain next Friday the 30th.
In his filmography he already accumulates titles with substance: Interstellar, Lady Bird, Mujercitas, Beautiful Boy, Call Me By Your Name (which underlined his rise in auteur cinema), Rainy Day in New York, Hostiles, To the Bone, The King (every actor wants a shakespeare), little women, the three installments of Dune, The French Chronicle (same: every actor wants one with Wes Anderson), Wonka, don’t look up o An unknown world.
“I don’t remember wanting to dedicate myself to anything else,” he said at the San Sebastián festival in the promo for Beautiful Boy. As a child he worked in several advertisements, and by the end of his adolescence he was already on the stage of the off Broadway, while he resolved his doubts about whether to feel French (like his father, a Unicef official) or American (like his mother, a real estate agent). “In the end I have been left with both worlds,” he confessed.
Added to his artistic ambition is his eye for marketing. The campaign of Marty Supreme It has been a hat-trick. His character – who is partly based on the real Marty Reisman – is a brawling ping-pong champion in the mid-1950s, a very young compulsive conman who lies, cajoles and concocts all kinds of tricks to survive. And to sell himself: he was the one who proposed that the ping-pong balls be orange so that they would look better, and in the film he even prints his name on them. That’s why Chalamet and his partner, Kylie Jenner, have appeared in bright orange on the red carpets. He even led a fake Zoom meeting with the promotional team of Marty Supreme, in which he said: “If we use a basic orange, we would be copying Barbie. And how do we manage to separate? In an intense, corroded, rusty orange!” What seemed like the leak of a high-voltage call is, in reality, another promotional tool. Like the orange zeppelin flying over Los Angeles. Or Chalamet being raised to the top of The Sphere circular stadium in Las Vegas, colored orange thanks to the LED lights while shouting “Marty Supreme.” Or appearing on television surrounded by men in black with ping-pong ball heads.
Fashion also enters this promotion, in what is known as method dressing or method styling. In the Oscar race with A complete strangerthe actor dedicated himself to replicating looks by Bob Dylan. Now give away jackets Marty Supreme whom he considers great, and in each appearance his wardrobe advertises the film. It always comes out well in the marketing. An example: at that San Sebastián festival in 2018, the press was prohibited from asking about his relationship with Woody Allen, who had fallen into disgrace at the time (Amazon did not know whether or not to release Rainy day in New York). When this journalist asked the actor in his last question: “Before, at most you would worry about your behavior. Now do you study the behavior of those who work at your side? Being a star, do you measure your steps much more?”, his publicist, sitting on the floor, jumped up shouting “Noooooooo. That’s a question about Woody Allen!” Chalamet looked at her with a sharp eye, and therefore decided to accompany the journalist on his way out of the suite to continue talking about the difficulties of adapting Dune and the different readings of the book: it calmed spirits.
All of the above does not mean that it is not a persistent work of interpretation. Since signing in 2018 for Marty Supreme, He has traveled the world with a ping-pong table. At the 2021 Cannes festival, he stayed in a luxury Airbnb on the outskirts of the city, rejecting a hotel suite, to have a garden with space and train with his colleagues. For a few years, he added guitar lessons to that training to perform like Bob Dylan. By video call, director Josh Safdie insists on that effort: “I met Timothée in 2017 and the person who introduced him to me assured me that he was going to be the next superstar. I wasn’t the only one, and of course those around Timothée fed that premonition. I don’t know, it seemed strange to me. Four months later I saw Call Me By Your Name, and I understood it. Timothée has the ability to take a small film and elevate it and make it bigger. “He is an icon, one of those larger than life.”
Safdie assures that the best way to understand Chalamet is to see him in action in real life: “There is something magical about him. In the conversations after the screenings he talks to each viewer as if there were only the two of them in the room.” The filmmaker has managed to make the actor’s ambition the backbone of the adrenaline-pumping action of Marty Mauser, his equally ambitious character, in two and a half hours of film that emanate a perennial Scorsese-style state of anxiety, a beacon in Safdie’s cinema. “We rewrote the script, because we felt that that energy would work. Marty is a child of his time, of an America that believes that anything is possible; that if you have a dream, you should go for it because you will achieve it. And Timothée has that drive.”
Safdie assures that that is where the similarities end. “I don’t think Timothée is a figure of individualism, as Marty was. That America in the 1950s, driven by the ironclad illusion of individualism, had an echo in Reagan’s America in the 1980s, which looked back with a condescending nostalgia. That’s why the music in the film belongs to that decade. However, Timothée was born in the 21st century, he explores more worlds and interests.”
And of course, the filmmaker emphasizes his artistic commitment. “I think it’s clear that this movie is not about sports.” Marty plays ping-pong like in The hustler Eddie Felson was into billiards. The universe in which they operate matters, the possibility of winning money and glory in it, not the sporting competition. “However, Timothée has been playing table tennis for years and years. He did not despair during the pandemic, nor while I was looking for financing,” he recalls.
A very intelligent actor
In reality, Timothée Chalamet has been, like his great rival at the Oscars, Leonardo DiCaprio, choosing each project with a lot of time and care. Search by authors, not by proposals. He went up to Dune because the person responsible was Denis Villeneuve. Javier Bardem, his co-star in the three installments of Dune, remembers for EL PAÍS: “I met Timothée the year before the pandemic. And I already told him what I still think. If at 20 years ago Call Me By Your Name y Beautiful Boy, What will he do when he grows up?”
Bardem explains: “I have witnessed that growth, how he adapts to circumstances. He is very intelligent, with a great sense of humor and a good companion. He has an enormous hunger to learn, he is always absorbing artistically and technically. Oh, and he respects his elders (laughs).” The Spanish actor remembers the astonishment he felt in A complete stranger not only the characterization, but that he sang all 15 songs just like Dylan. “He is someone who prepares a lot. In Marty Supreme He does the best job of the year. And I think it will continue to grow.”
Chalamet fulfills one last rule to win the Oscar with Marty Supreme: abandon your beauty and become ugly. In this film, he wears acne-like dressings on his face. Gwyneth Paltrow, who met him on the set and who plays a mature actress in need of joy, saw him and recommended some creams. Chalamet showed her that her pimples were pure makeup.
And what does the aforementioned think? On the BBC, in December, he assured that his responsibility lies “in making what he does on screen believable” be it playing and singing, or playing ping-pong. “I get to enjoy this incredible life working on projects that I really care about. Many actors don’t even get to work, let alone do it on projects that they’re truly passionate about. Truly, there are worse things in life than having to learn to play the guitar and play table tennis at a high level.” And your future? Beyond other collaborations with the Liverpool rapper EsDeeKid (the viral rumor mill claims that they are the same person), Chalamet is committed to vital development: “I want to grow as a person. But that is a big learning curve. And I try not to be too hard on myself or on those around me, who are also growing.” On March 15, if the wave of One battle after another Don’t support DiCaprio, Chalamet will collect his first, and well-deserved, Oscar.