In Reunited, Awards Insider hosts a conversation between two Oscar contenders who have collaborated on a previous project.
When two of the most exciting actors of their generation take the stage together, you expect fireworks. Especially when those two actors, Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet, have starred in two movies together in which their chemistry was simply undeniable.
The Outrun, Ronan stars as an alcoholic who returns to her home on Scotland’s Orkney Islands in the hopes of finding recovery and redemption. In Blitz, she stars as a mother searching for her son after he goes missing during the WW II bombings in London. Chalamet returned to Arrakis earlier this year to star in the epic Dune: Part Two, then took on the daunting task of playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown.
Here, the two look back at how Lady Bird and Little Women shaped them as actors, discuss the challenges of playing real people in their recent films, and reveal the types of movies they’re eager to explore in the future.
Vanity Fair: What do you remember about the first time you met?
Timothée Chalamet: I do remember it was a rehearsal in Los Angeles. I feel like it was at Greta’s apartment or something. I just remember Saoirse arriving with an assistant. I thought that was very impressive.
Saoirse Ronan: Never! I also drive myself to work.
Chalamet: That’s not my recollection. And we had this rehearsal with Greta and—I am going to do a lot of blowing smoke tonight, so just get ready—Saoirse continues to be a legend, but already she was a legend then. I was just blown away immediately just by her level of talent.
Ronan: We were very lucky that we clicked straight away, and we had Greta, who was so excited by whatever was happening between the two of us.
How would you describe where you were in your careers at the time?
Ronan: I was still at that point where I was just like, Oh great, someone gave me a job! This is amazing! I was a huge fan of Greta’s, and I found her—not because of anything that she had sort of given off—incredibly intimidating to me during Lady Bird, because I wanted to emulate her so much in her style and the type of work that she made. At that stage, I didn’t even really know yet that I would want to direct one day, but it was sort of in the back of my head percolating somewhere. But she was just this thing that I was so obsessed with—and knowing that even though Lady Bird wasn’t an out-and-out comedy, the fact that it was more comedic than anything else was something that really intimidated me because I just think it’s the hardest genre to pull off, especially if you’re not a comedian. So I was very, very nervous the whole way through, which I think I feel like I spoke to you about.
Chalamet: Wow. My memory is that the role felt like a glove on you.
Ronan: I felt really relieved to have you there. Having someone who had this sort of European flair in the way that you did, and you were so sort of unique and nothing I’d ever met before—that was really refreshing for me.
How did Greta present the idea of the two of you doing Little Women together?
Ronan: I’m curious to know how you got involved. I sort of had to tell her that I was going to be in it because she hadn’t landed on me yet. And we were in the middle of promoting Lady Bird, and I was like, “By the way, I’m obviously going to be Jo, right?” She was like, “Yes, sure?” But I wasn’t sure how you got involved. Did she just ask?
Chalamet: She did just ask. I read for both parts. I read for Lucas Hedges’s part and the part I ended up doing. I was just dying to work with Greta again. She just gave off this incredible vibe, and there’s a whole generation of New York filmmakers—Greta, the Safdie brothers, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers—that were all doing really unique work that seemed to have come up together. But Greta was one of the ones I really wanted to work with. I got the call and I remember being not surprised, but Lady Bird was so in Greta’s voice, and now she’s proven with Little Women and Barbie that everything’s in her voice. But what I thought was, [This is] the ninth version—there had been many versions prior—but I just wanted to get involved with Greta and she was very persuasive.
Ronan: I thought it was also a surprise for her, off the back of Lady Bird, which became this sort of indie-darling movie, to then follow that with an American literary classic that had been remade so many times. I was like, What’s this director going to do with that?
Chalamet: She was so fired up. I also remember on Little Women, I had Beautiful Boy coming out at that time and that was basically the second “big-ish movie” I was in, and I was having a hard time getting people on the phone to help me figure out my schedule, where I was going to go. I wanted to do a regional tour and visit places in the states that were affected by that story. I was in my trailer, and I guess I was supposed to be in the chair at a certain time and I was on the phone trying to do this thing, and I get this bang on my trailer door, really intensely. I was thinking someone died, and I opened the door and its Saoirse in a bald cap. She’s like, “Get your ass in the fucking trailer right now! They’re waiting for you in the hair and makeup.” And I always just love that memory.
Ronan: Are you on time now?
Chalamet: I’m on time all the time. [Laughs] We were so young too. It makes me nostalgic for those movies, but also I’m happy to be older in some ways. I kind of see where we both were at in life, not in any tragic way, but you’re still figuring yourself out in your early 20s.
Ronan: I’ve not really had an experience acting with anyone else as I have done with you, where it’s an energy that I’m not used to, whether it’s on set or in real life, and it really keeps me awake and alert and it keeps me very creative. So there’s a real sort of aliveness, I think, when I work with Timothée.
What do you think is harder, learning to play guitar and sing like Bob Dylan or learning lambing like Saoirse had to for The Outrun?
Ronan: I’ve never had to pretend to sing like Bob Dylan, so I don’t know. I imagine it’s difficult. It was so impressive, though. It didn’t feel like I was watching a movie about Bob Dylan. I felt like I was watching this young man who knew his own mind, but he was still open to the world around him, and it sounded like this voice that I’ve grown up listening to, but also you’d added so much of yourself to it. It was so beautiful. I’d imagine that was hard. Was it?
Chalamet: I mean, I just fell in love with the process and the young man that is Bob, and it’s honestly very moving to hear Saoirse talk about it because it’s weird– it feels like worlds colliding. The process on Bob was an individual one for years. Not that it was lonely, but I was alone. So to hear my sister, in many ways, commend that, it is really moving to me. I do know how to help lambs give birth because in New York it’s a very normal thing. [Laughs] And I’ll say it’s harder.
Ronan: That’s settled. It’s harder. Sorry, Bob.
The Outrun has some dark parts to its story. Did you have to carry that emotional darkness with you?
Ronan: No, I didn’t have to carry it through the shoot. It kind of felt like therapy, I guess. You were able to let so much of it out. Also that’s just why I do this. I do it because it feels good for me to get that out and to be able to take any sort of messy emotion that you have and sort of give it some alignment, give it some shape, control it in a way so that it doesn’t get out of control within you.
Timothée, you were prepping to play Bob for years, even while shooting the Dune films. Do you feel like they ever overlapped in your performances?
Chalamet: Well, I was working on this since 2018 or 2019, so I’d get massively passionate and involved in it for three, four months at a time and put it away when I worked on another project. I’d keep listening to the music, but not working the guitar or the harmonica or the voice or studying the documentaries as much. We were supposed to do it in the summer of 2020, then there was a pandemic, then [director] Jim [Mangold] went off and did Indiana Jones, which took him out for three years, basically. And they were supposed to do the summer of 2023, but then there was the actor strike. I had two moments when I was geared up to do it, and it didn’t happen. I thought, Maybe this is the universe suggesting I shouldn’t do this. And by the time we got going, it felt like a relief.
What was it like when you shot your first scene in which you had to play the guitar and sing?
Chalamet: I definitely felt nervous. It was the scene where I play a song called “Song for Woody.” It’s just this really sweet, touching, simple song in a sense. And that was the first one we did with Edward [Norton] and Scoot McNairy, and I was really nervous also because there was this whole war on the movie [about] using prerecorded or doing the music live. I was always in the camp wanting to do it live. When that song went well, I felt like I had the green light and the gas to sort of do a dance with the music team of the movie and Jim to always do it live. Edward Norton was always in my ear saying, “You sound better live, do it live.”
Both your families came to New York, but you both have ties to Europe, growing up in France and Ireland. How do you think being sort of from two worlds shapes you as actors?
Ronan: For me, I never felt like I was from one place. And I think having that feeling, matched with being an only child, meant that I was just in my imagination all the time. The one thing that was consistent for me was the characters that I would make up in my own head that I would either sort of act out myself or I would imagine were with me. Also, I grew up around a lot of actors. My dad was an actor in New York, so I was around so many different types of performers and accents and different melodies and personalities, and I think I just soaked all of that up. But I think a lot of it was down to the fact that I was neither from here or there.
You both started acting so young. Was there a point where you had to decide, This is my career and not just a childhood hobby?
Chalamet: I feel like I was put on the traditional American academic path and didn’t know why. It was very peculiar to me that I was paying money to be somewhere I didn’t want to be. And I had enough momentum with my acting that I thought, Okay, it’s sort of now or never. I felt like if I had a plan B or if I was working towards a plan B, my plan A would be ruined.
Ronan: I was doing it from so young that it was just sort of a part of me. I remember distinctly that the first one was on Atonement when I was 12, and I did my first crying scene, which is a big moment for any actor, when they realize they can cry. And people love it when you cry and always get random applause. And I remember going, This is what I’m going to do forever!
How has your approach to the fame-and-celebrity aspect of your job changed?
Chalamet: I don’t know. I almost feel like it’s the least interesting thing to talk about because I don’t really know the answer. The ways you would think it’s weird, it’s weird. It’s actually probably the most boring thing to talk about in my life. Man, even that sounded pretentious, but I’m trying to say it in the least pretentious way. There’s nothing interesting about it. There’s nothing interesting about sometimes feeling distant from [yourself] in some way.
Ronan: I remember years ago, randomly I had a film out and Patti Smith turned up, which was just amazing. She said, “Remember, it’s always about the work.” All that it’s about is the work. This is the weird thing about actors in particular becoming celebrities: What we do is we’re pretending to be someone else. There’s so much of us in there, but it’s masked by another person. So it’s a very strange thing to then be like, “But we want to know about you.” And Timmy’s experienced it in a way that I never have. And I don’t know how you do it, but I think that the more air you can take out of it—if you can take the oxygen away from it as the person who’s experiencing it—the better. And then it gives you clarity to just focus on your actual life and the work that you do and the people that are in it, the people that you love and your hobbies and your life.
What’s your favorite performance of the other person?
Chalamet: Am I allowed to have been in it? [Laughs] I could make it about Brooklyn because I love Brooklyn too. But there was something so magical in Little Women. She just tapped into something. It’s the scene in the attic that I’m not in; it’s with Laura Dern, where she just tapped into something extraordinary.
Ronan: I think it’s the same for me. I loved you in Call Me by Your Name as well, so much. But there is something very special, I think, about Jo and Laurie and Little Women. It’s magic.
Is there a specific movie genre that you haven’t yet explored but you would like to?
Ronan: A musical.
Chalamet: Oh man, you’ve got to do a musical. What musical would you do?
Ronan: Wicked. [Laughs] I can’t stop thinking about Wicked. Maybe an original. I would like to do a biopic of someone. I’m not going to say who it is. I don’t want someone else to steal it.
Chalamet: Is she alive?
Ronan: Yes.
Chalamet: Do they know you want to do it?
Ronan: No. I’m curious what you want to do?
Chalamet: I don’t know. I don’t think in genres. There’s great directors I want to work with.
Like who?
Chalamet: It’s probably still Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s the dream.
If your respective characters from Lady Bird were real, what do you think they would be doing now, in 2024?
Chalamet: Oh my God. I was reading about this recently. People that think an armageddon’s coming, they buy these properties—you can give a certain amount of money a year to be part of a program where, if a doomsday comes, you can knock on the door, and they’ll give you a bed for however long our armageddon is.
Ronan: What would Lady Bird be doing? I mean, she’s loosely based on Greta, so she’d be directing. She met Margot Robbie at an award show and made Barbie.
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The post Timothée Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan Meet Again—and Remember the “Magic” of ‘Lady Bird’ and ‘Little Women’ appeared first on Vanity Fair.