Timothée Chalamet is the Oscar nominated teen heartthrob redefining what it means to be a leading man in 2018. Harry Styles is the platinum-selling award-winning musician asking the world to treat people with kindness. To mark the release of Timothée's hotly anticipated new film Beautiful Boy, they discuss navigating fame, social media and modern masculinity. Click here to order the issue.
When
Timothée Chalamet shot onto our screens in
Call Me by Your Name in 2017, the world fell hard and fast in love with his delicate face and foppish hair. Despite his beauty, it was Timothée’s skill and power in the role of trilingual, precocious, Elio, that was most revelatory. It was a role that deservedly earned him the youngest Best Actor Oscar nomination in 80 years, and his star has been on an upward trajectory since.
Timothée went on to appear in the Oscar-nominated, Greta Gerwig-directed
Ladybird, in which he gave the high school cool kid surprising emotional depth, but it is his current role in the Felix van Groeningen-directed
Beautiful Boy that has taken his star to the next level.
In
Beautiful Boy, Timothée plays well-to-do teen, Nic, who spirals into crystal meth addiction to the horror of his journalist father, David, played by Steve Carell. From the outside, Nic has an enviable life. Living in San Francisco’s Bay area on the beautiful, surfwashed north California coast, a bright future awaits him. That’s until his interest in drugs takes a dark turn and he abandons home, descending into addiction. Based on the memoirs of father-and-son David and Nic Sheff, the dual perspective is what gives
Beautiful Boy its devastating impact.
Timothée gives a visceral performance as a desperate, wounded Nic, while his father struggles to account for what went wrong. The cycle of recovery and relapse and back again makes for blistering viewing, but unlike other drug films,
Beautiful Boy offers no trite, moralistic answers. It exists instead as a powerful account of a father and son’s relationship and the addiction that shatters their world.
Timothée captures Nic in all his complexities; from meeting his dad in a San Fran café obnoxiously strung out, only to ruthlessly scam him for cash, to being clean and back home again wearing the broken demeanour of someone who knows recovery won’t last. Tear-inducing and hard to watch, the film is deservedly gaining major Oscar buzz. In
a post #MeToo world, Timothée Chalamet represents the change we want to see in the film industry. He’s sensitive, honest, thoughtful, polite, goofy, and self-aware. He’s in touch with his feminine side, and he smiles. A lot.
Loved by girls and boys alike for his pretty looks, he’s the modern teen heartthrob, the likes of which we haven’t seen in film for years. Existing in the same lineage as James Dean, River Phoenix and Leonardo DiCaprio, the 22-year-old New Yorker's rushed at premieres, stalked online, hounded by gossip columnists and trailed by paparazzi. The internet is obsessed with him. There are hashtags dedicated to documenting his every move; from
#timotheechalametdoingthings to
#timotheechalamethair. Earlier this year, the Instagram account
@chalametinart went viral by photoshopping Timothée into famous works of art including Michelangelo’s David and Botticelli’s
The Birth of Venus, with the tagline “Proof he really is a masterpiece”.
Serious about acting, but playful about his own role in it, off screen Timothée’s as much a fanboy as the rest of us. He fawns over
Cardi B,
Kid Cudi and
Frank Ocean, just as much as we flip out about his LaGuardia high school rap videos, which have been watched on YouTube over a million times. At the premiere for
Beautiful Boy in London this October, Timothée wore a floral handpainted suit by Sarah Burton at McQueen. It was a look more than a little reminiscent of a certain
Harry Styles, and it sent the internet into meltdown.
Read more:
Timothée Chalamet in conversation with Harry Styles
