This fall, four years after he graduated from Manhattan’s LaGuardia performing-arts high school, 21-year-old Timothée Chalamet stood onstage at Alice Tully Hall, only a block away from the institution where not so long ago he was just another aspiring actor. The occasion was the New York Film Festival screening of Sony Pictures Classics’ Call Me by Your Name, the film adaptation, by Italian director Luca Guadagnino, of André Aciman’s coming-of-age novel. In it, Chalamet plays Elio, a teenager sexually awakened by a lodger (Armie Hammer) who spends the summer in the Italian countryside with the boy’s intellectual family. The film had already conquered Sundance and become a festival-circuit darling. To Chalamet, the whole scene was, understandably, strange.
“Luca, Armie, and I were watching the film together in this little box, which was a special moment in itself,” he said. “And when the credits ended, they immediately put this blinding spotlight on us, so that we couldn’t see the audience, but we heard this incredible reaction. I’m a theater guy at heart, so to have a film experience that mirrored the theater experience was totally surreal.”
It’s been like that lately for Chalamet. In the span of a year, the actor has gone from Sundance revelation to the star of the next Woody Allen film. Though this ascent might spook less confident performers, Chalamet, a Manhattan native, felt the Allen movie was a natural next step. “I’ve been living in New York my whole life, so, in a weird way, I feel entirely prepared for it,” he said of the secrecy-shrouded project, which also stars Selena Gomez and Elle Fanning. Chalamet comes from a performing family; he followed his mother, uncle, and sister at LaGuardia. A closer look at his roots reveals a deeper Allen connection. Though the director didn’t know it when he cast him, Chalamet is the grandson of screenwriter Harold Flender, who wrote for Sid Caesar (as did Allen, Mel Brooks, and Carl Reiner, among others) and The Jackie Gleason Show in the 1950s.
“My mom and grandmother are very excited and feel like it’s coming full circle,” Chalamet said.
The actor will conclude the year with three possible awards contenders. There was last month’s Lady Bird (A24), Greta Gerwig’s debut as a solo director, in which he plays a shaggy-haired guitar player so dreamy that star Saoirse Ronan’s character puts her identity on hold to spend time in his orbit. This month brings his 1890s army private in Scott Cooper’s Hostiles (Entertainment Studios). But it is Call Me by Your Name that launched Chalamet’s upward trajectory at Sundance and continued to push him forward when the film officially released a few weeks ago.
In many ways, the depth of the film’s love story depends on Chalamet’s ability to convey an unpredictable stream of teenage emotions—restlessness, lust, sensitivity, surliness—as his relationship with Hammer’s character blooms. When Guadagnino (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash) first heard of Chalamet—from agent Brian Swardstrom—the filmmaker had already spent seven years trying to get an adaptation off the ground. Chalamet, who was 17 when he met Guadagnino, had just wrapped a recurring role on Showtime’s Homeland as Finn Walden, the troublemaker son of the vice president (Jamey Sheridan). But it wasn’t the actor’s résumé that impressed Guadagnino when they met for breakfast.
“I saw an incredibly articulate, bright, smart, artistically ambitious young man, someone who not only had a sense of self that was completely un-narcissistic but had ambition to make sure his art as an actor was shining on-screen,” Guadagnino said.
By the time the actor and filmmaker had finished their conversation, Guadagnino was convinced Chalamet was Elio. Though it took three additional years for the producers and director to find financing, Guadagnino kept a close eye on Chalamet—watching him play Matthew McConaughey’s son in 2014’s Interstellar and seeing him star in the 2016 Off Broadway production of Prodigal Son, from Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley.
“I saw how consistent he was, so when this movie finally happened, it was a no-brainer that I had to work with him,” said Guadagnino.
To channel Elio, Chalamet arrived six weeks before filming began in Northern Italy, where the actor, who is fluent in French, spent balmy afternoons learning Italian, taking guitar and piano lessons, and bicycling around. When Hammer arrived a few weeks later, Chalamet was familiar enough with the landscape and the language that the actors’ real-life dynamic—as host and visitor—mirrored what they would play on-screen. “We got on bikes within an hour of meeting each other, rode around town, and I showed him some of the spots I had found that I liked,” Chalamet said.
Call Me by Your Name is an old-fashioned drama, relying on explosions of the heart rather than Hollywood special effects. Though Chalamet shared love scenes with three different screen partners—Hammer, Esther Garrel, and, as fans of the novel know well, a peach—the actor is quick to brush off any awkwardness around these encounters.
“There is no evil antagonist in this film or villain . . . . It’s just a real story with human fluctuations of love, which requires emotional honesty,” he said. “Armie and I decided before the movie started that was going to be the biggest challenge . . . . It wasn’t the sexual parts, but the idea that the entire soul of the film is between these two men.”
