Timothée Chalamet goes bro

Timothée Chalamet scored the second Oscar nomination of his young career this week, and he’s a favorite to take home the trophy. In many ways, his work as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown is classic Oscars fare: an Academy darling who donned prosthetics and learned how to play the guitar for his turn as a musical icon. Yet all the same, as Chalamet campaigns assiduously for the trophy, the publicity offense he’s mounting doesn’t look quite like traditional Oscars campaigns do.

Chalamet has always had a flair for the quirky, and now he’s playing it up. He rode a bike onto the red carpet for the London premiere of A Complete Unknown and got fined $79.53 for not parking it correctly. In December, he guested on the popular pregame football show College GameDay to deliver analysis that I, a woman who writes about celebrities for a living, shall not pretend to understand but that I am reliably informed showcased shocking levels of football nerdery. This weekend, he will take a turn as both the host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live, and the promos wink at the viral Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest held in Washington Square Park last fall, where he shocked attendees by showing up in person.

“Timothée, undeniably the top actor of his generation, and the youngest contender in the Best Actor field this season, isn’t subscribing to the usual Oscar playbook and navigating the circuit with the seriousness and maturity of someone a decade older than he is just so some old ass voter in Palm Springs will take him seriously,” wrote celebrity commenter Lainey Gossip approvingly after the Golden Globes. “Because his work is already serious. His talent is already serious. That’s all that should matter and the rest of it is just who he is.”

The whimsy of Chalamet’s press tour doesn’t only work because of the seriousness of his talent and the leeway it’s bought him. It’s also a showcase for one of his greatest strengths as a celebrity: his ability to embody dualities.

We tend to like movie stars who can embody both sides of a paradox at once, the way Marilyn Monroe embodied both sex and innocence at once or the way that Marlon Brando represented both authenticity and artistry. That’s the complexity that makes a great star image unforgettable. Chalamet has risen to the top of the A-list of his generation in part by being able to reconcile opposites with seeming ease: masculine and feminine, very young and also ageless — and, perhaps most fundamental of all in recent months, artist and bro.

Chalamet looks fundamentally strange for a Hollywood A-lister. He’s tall, but he’s pale and skinny; from the moment he made his first gangling teenage steps across the screen in Call Me by Your Name, people started joking about how he looked like a starving Victorian urchin. He’s also undeniably attractive to girls, in the same way Titanic-era Leonardo DiCaprio was: There’s a sort of androgynous waifish beauty to him that speaks tenderly to the hearts of teenagers. He looks very young and very vulnerable, which is part of why it’s so fun to watch him play against type.

Chalamet’s collaborators have often talked about his performances in terms of those dualities. Denis Villeneuve, who cast Chalamet in Dune as a callow teen who develops into a messiah, told GQ in 2020 that he was drawn to Chalamet’s combination of age and youth.

“You feel that he has already lived through several lives,” Villeneuve said. “And at the same time, he looks so young on camera. Sometimes he’d look almost 14 years old. He has this kind of general youth in his features and the contrast with the old-soul quality in his eyes — it’s a kid that knows more about life than his age.”

In Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, Chalamet plays Laurie, the music-loving boy with a girl’s name who is the inverse and best friend of Saoirse Ronan’s tomboyish Jo.

“One of the things that we spoke about a lot when we were doing Little Women, in terms of our characters, but also in terms of myself and him as people, is that we both have this masculinity and femininity equally,” Ronan told GQ in 2020. “And I think that that’s one of his strengths, is that he can be incredibly sort of feminine and sensitive and sensual, and also he’s a guy that, you know, girls fancy.”

Chalamet tends to play up this quality on the red carpet, where he favors an extravagant rock and roll androgyny: backless jumpsuits and ’70s velvets — very much the wardrobe of a man who came of age after the “no homo” generation.

Meanwhile, Eric Vetro, his vocal coach for both Wonka and A Complete Unknown, told GQ in 2023 that Chalamet’s great strength was his ability to balance exuberance with reverence for the work. “He does everything with such a playful air, but there’s always that core of real seriousness where he is gonna nail it.”

It’s the same duality that Lainey Gossip is highlighting when she says that Chalamet’s work has earned him the right to play around on his Oscars campaign: serious and mischievous at once.

But the duality that Chalamet is experimenting with right now is one that he hasn’t shown off much previously. It’s the artist versus the bro.

In the past, this duality came to light most clearly through his relationship with Kylie Jenner, which shocked fans when it was first made public in 2023. What, they demanded, was Timothée Chalamet, with his poet’s face and real actor cred, doing with the Kardashian-Jenner sister most famous for selling lip liner?

Club Chalamet, a 57-year-old social media poster and the internet’s most prominent Chalamet fan, hosted a Twitter Spaces at the time where the rest of the fandom could process the trauma of the moment. Kylie, Club Chalamet said, “attracts a certain crowd that has very low IQs.” Fans worried in tweets that she “doesnt have anything to offer Timothee on an intellectual level,” that she was too “artificial.” In the end, however, Club Chalamet concluded, “Timothée Chalamet is a 28 year-old man making 28 year-old man decisions about his life and we have to accept that.” Regardless, “Club Chalamet is here to stay because Timothée is a remarkably talented man who works on projects that are compelling and incredibly exciting.”

There was the fundamental problem: On the one hand, Timothée was a remarkably talented man. On the other hand, he was a 28-year-old man. A 28-year-old man dating a Kardashian, even! How to reconcile the two?

Promoting A Complete Unknown, Chalamet has been toying around with this problem — only this time, he’s doing so in a way that delights his fans rather than discomfiting them the way his relationship with Jenner did. That’s part of why his appearance on College GameDay was so fun: It played hard against his artistic type, but it showed off his bro side with aplomb.

Chalamet has talked about sports in his interviews before — in a GQ profile in 2018, he re-created famous Knicks press conferences at the Madison Square Garden pressroom. Yet the idea of Chalamet as a sports fan never particularly took root in his star image, perhaps because the idea of Chalamet as artist, highbrow and feminine-coded, was so strong, and perhaps because he simply didn’t look like the kind of guy who was into sports. As GQ put it in 2018, he has “the sort of frame that’s forged in high schools without football teams.”

Now, that’s changed. In his College GameDay appearance, Chalamet outperformed some of the professional sports commentators on the panel with him. “timothee chalamet might be the best we ever seen,” commented one Sports Illustrated writer as Chalamet’s predictions bore out one after the other.

Perhaps more revealingly, Chalamet also began to suggest in interviews that he’s never been as artsy and Byronic as his pale, skinny appearance and fancy French name would suggest. In a 2024 profile with Rolling Stone, Chalamet revealed that his dream was always to star in action franchises, that he auditioned fruitlessly for roles in The Maze Runner and Divergent, that he was always turned down because he didn’t have the muscle tone to look the part.

“I was trying to put on weight. I couldn’t! I basically couldn’t. My metabolism or whatever the fuck couldn’t do it,” Chalamet said. He said he ended up in the indie movies that made him a star more or less by default, because he couldn’t land the kind of roles he wanted. “I was knocking on one door that wouldn’t open,” he said to Rolling Stone. “So I went to what I thought was a more humble door, but actually ended up being explosive for me.”

Everyone knows that Chalamet is a great actor, which is why it’s always been easy to think of him as intellectual and artistically driven — his breakout character from Call Me by Your Name, grown perhaps a little older but no less innocent. Which means that the more Chalamet insists that in real life, he’s actually a football-loving Kardashian-dating bro, the more impressive his screen work looks by comparison. It takes a generational talent, after all, for a bro to transform into an artist in front of your very eyes.