Timothée on Zendaya, Fame, and Being a New Kind of Leading Man
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Timothée Chalamet has had quite a year, even if he only starred in the year’s sexiest cannibal love story (Bones and All), and happened to have made a movie with an actual alleged cannibal (Armie Hammer).
The actor’s career blossomed after “Call Me by Your Name,” with two dramas directed by Greta Gerwig — “Lady Bird” and “Little Women.” And then he landed the lead as Paul Atreides in the “Dune” franchise, his biggest hit to date.
“Dune: Part Two,” which he’s filming now, reunites him with “Little Women” co-star Florence Pugh. “We were joking on set that we keep doing these movies, and we end up together even though we should be ending up with different people,” he says. “Florence is really special. She’s an incredible actor. She was incredible in ‘Dune’ — seriously incredible. She brought a gravitas to the role. And I can’t believe my good fortune at this young age … between Taylor Russell in ‘Bones and All’ and Zendaya in ‘Dune.’ And Austin Butler’s in that movie too.”
Zendaya will have a larger role in the second “Dune,” reprising her part as the warrior Chani. “She hasn’t wrapped yet,” he says, “and it’s amazing. She’s bringing exactly what she brought to the first one — which was incredible — but in greater abundance. And she’s really become a sister. I’m so grateful to count her as a partner and a sister and a friend” — he looks over at Guadagnino — “and also to share stories about how amazing it is to work with Luca, because we worked with him back to back on wildly different projects.” He’s referencing the fact that Zendaya collaborated with Guadagnino on “Challengers,” a romantic comedy set in the tennis world, which is in postproduction.
Chalamet was in Rome doing reshoots for the first “Dune,” stuck in Europe during the pandemic, when Guadagnino sent him the “Bones and All” screenplay. They talked at length, and the actor realized that this could be the first project in which he might have a hand in shaping his character.
“It excited me, because it felt like it was very different than the first project we had done together,” Chalamet says. “It excited me, too, because I felt the bones of Lee — no pun intended — were there, but there was a lack of direction.” Guadagnino encouraged Chalamet to fill out the character by working with the screenwriter, David Kajganich, an experience he’d never had before.
Guadagnino calls “Bones” “a fairy tale.” “It’s about two young people — a girl, in particular — roaming this world of darkness and dealing with the challenges within and without, finding love in the gaze of one another and trying to overcome impossibility.”
Still, the outcast lovers feast on human body parts, a butchery the film does not shy away from. Guadagnino says quickly that he and his editor, Marco Costa, made a point of cutting away from gratuitous gore. He was not interested in shock value but rather an intensity of desire.
Russell and Chalamet, for their part, wanted to explore the emotional relationship more than the cannibalism. But, Russell says, they also “talked about eating somebody, eating anything, using your body, your hands, your mouth — it’s so tactile, so physical, that, in some ways, it’s simple.”
Guadagnino and his team thought about the consequences of a precarious life led roaming through cornfields and along back roads in the 1980s Midwest, “dealing with violence and the unexpected.”
“We came up with a lot of very subtle ideas about wearing the fatigue of being an eater on their faces and bodies — like scars in unpredictable places because of the reactions of the victims, who wounded them.”
One of Chalamet’s first lines in the film is “If you weigh 140 pounds wet, you got to have an attitude — a big attitude.” Asked whether he lost weight for the role, Chalamet answers, “Yeah,” without elaborating on how many pounds he’d dropped. Then he says, “That look that Maren and Lee have, I think it feeds the fablelike quality of the story, and of people that are living in extremes. As opposed to what the reality would be, perhaps: If you were consistently devouring entire human bodies, it would probably leave you with a bigger figure than they have.”
Chalamet worked with costume designer Giulia Piersanti on Lee’s look, riffing off the grunge aesthetic of 1980s punk rock. “Lee would want to express himself through his clothes,” Chalamet says. To help with this mix of big attitude and skinny body, they decided to dye his hair with sun-bleached streaks of pinkish reds, chop off some curls on the sides, and give Lee tattoos on his arms and hand.
Of course, everyone wants to know if Chalamet and Guadagnino are planning a sequel to “Call Me by Your Name.” Guadagnino floated the idea almost as soon as he debuted the original at Sundance, while he was doing press with Chalamet and Armie Hammer, who played Chalamet’s older lover, Oliver. But the project’s chances of making it to the screen have dwindled in the wake of allegations against Hammer in early 2021 for being physically and emotionally abusive to women, including suggesting that he eat their flesh. (Despite speculation in the tabloids, these cannibal exchanges had nothing to do with the inspiration for “Bones and All.”)
“I would love to make a second and third and fourth chapter of all my movies,” Guadagnino says. “Why? Because I truly love the actors I work with, so I want to repeat the joy of doing what we did together.”
However, when it comes to “Call Me by Your Name,” Guadagnino says, “there is no hypothesis, so there is no movie. It’s a wish and a desire, and I have not made up my mind about what would be the story.” When asked if the film could still include Hammer’s character, he says, “Yeah, of course.” Then he presents another potential storyline for a sequel — following Mafalda, the housekeeper, played by Vanda Capriolo, who resides in Elio’s family’s summer home. “Which is divine,” he says. “I would be very interested in seeing what is the life of Mafalda when she’s not around the family.”
