Timothee Chalamet: ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ was ‘one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen’

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Timothee Chalamet covered this month’s issue of GQ, mostly to promote Dune 2 and some early promo for Wonka. The interview was conducted pre-strike, which is why the piece reads as “filled out” excessively by quotes from directors and producers, because GQ didn’t have time to ask Timmy follow-up questions during the strike. Chalamet is very good in this piece, he talks a lot about how much he’s “grown up” in the past three years, how much he admires his generational peers like Zendaya, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, etc, how he feels like he’s leveling up. Some highlights from GQ:

Pandemic life: “I had spent a lot of time after high school with my head in the clouds, imagining a life as an actor, and totally oblivious to the life I was actually leading,” he said. “I was out of touch with an in-touch life. And during COVID, it flipped, and I was forced to become very in touch with my increasingly out-of-touch life. It was not good for me.”

He’s 27 years old now: “You start going on Instagram, seeing people from your high school getting married, friends having kids, and you start going: This balls-to-the-wall thing, even at this amazing level I’m at that probably couldn’t have gone better—you still start wondering, How long till you have to change?”

Filming ‘Bones & All’ in middle-America in 2021: “It’s something I think about a lot with Dylan, that life rhythms are different. When you’re raised in the city, going stir-crazy during the pandemic, your life rhythm becomes agitated. And driving through the middle of the country listening to Townes Van Zandt, your life rhythm adjusts in a great way…I got my second jab in Cincinnati.”

The Armie Hammer story breaking as they prepped Bones & All: “I mean, what were the chances that we’re developing this thing?” Chalamet said, reflecting on that strange period. When false reports suggested the film was inspired by the news, “it made me feel like: Now I’ve really got to do this. Because this is actually based on a book.” Chalamet’s face went stiff when I asked him to describe how he personally experienced the allegations against Hammer. “I don’t know,” he said, reluctantly. “These things end up getting clickbaited so intensely. Disorienting is a good word.”

He’s obsessed with Austin Butler. “It started on Zoom, when we did a [Dune 2] cast reading.” Was Butler still talking like Elvis? I asked him. “No, here’s the thing, he was already talking like Stellan Skarsgård.” That is, on day one of the first read-through, Butler had already dialed his way all the way into the character, the heir to Skarsgård’s Baron Harkonnen. “And you could see everyone was, like…”—he laughed a little nervously—“I can’t overstate how inspiring it was to me personally. Because here was someone who’s a little older than me, but generationally we’re similar, and I don’t know how he would put it, but his journey was different than mine… he takes the work incredibly seriously. And I feel like I hadn’t seen that among someone my age, whether it was in drama school or on set, that did take the work that seriously but then after ‘cut’ wasn’t, you know, in some show of how seriously they took it—and instead is this tremendously affable, wonderful man.”

He’s also obsessed with Tom Cruise: “After I met Tom Cruise, right after finishing the first Dune, he sent me the most wonderfully inspiring email,” Chalamet said. It included a Rolodex of sorts of all the experts he might need for stunt training. A motorcycle coach. A helicopter coach. “He basically said, in Old Hollywood, you would be getting dance training and fight training, and nobody is going to hold you to that standard today. So it’s up to you. The email was really like a war cry.”

He loved ‘Top Gun: Maverick’: While filming Dune Part Two, in the summer and fall of 2022, Chalamet said he saw Top Gun: Maverick eight times. On one occasion, he bought out a movie theater in Budapest for two bucks a seat and took the whole cast and crew. “Top Gun was just hugely inspiring to me last summer when we were making Dune,” he said. “Some of the crew were kind of scoffing at going, but I just thought it was one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen.”

His romance with Kylie Jenner: “I can’t say that this stuff doesn’t matter because my intense fandom has led me to where I am.” But he also bristles at the suggestion that he might not be entitled to a wholly private life. When I told him that this is all a fair and practically inalienable right, but that if he really wanted to be left alone he might not spend time with one of the four most followed people on Instagram, he nodded and chuckled: “This reminds me of that recent South Park episode with the Worldwide Privacy Tour,” he said, referring to a send-up of Harry and Meghan flying around in a private jet and appearing on a talk show to demand: We want privacy! We want privacy! “Sometimes, people are going to be hella confused when you say you’re trying to live a private life.”

[From GQ]

There’s something so charming about Timothee Chalamet meeting Austin Butler via Zoom for a Dune 2 reading and immediately becoming obsessed with Butler’s hyper-Method approach to the work. That’s my biggest takeaway – Timmy is like “omg, he’s more prepared than me and he’s my peer!” It stoked his competitive fires. Chalamet is also obsessed with Zendaya and her team too, but in a nicer, less competitive way – he just appreciates the way Zendaya rolls and he enjoys watching her navigate her stardom. As for the Kylie Jenner stuff… interesting that he name-checked that South Park episode. Hm.

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Covers courtesy of GQ.

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