Timothée Chalamet was supposed to be different. He shot to stardom in 2017, when it didn’t seem that Hollywood was able to mint leading men anymore and masculinity was being questioned as a concept. Waifish and pale, with a fine, wavy mop, he looked like a consumptive Victorian garret-dwelling artist and epitomized the soft boy type, a much-needed antidote to alpha male smarm. There was an undeniable sweetness to him, with a vulpine irreverence flickering just beneath the surface.
Alas, heart-on-his-sleeve Timothée Chalamet has since given way to what, if you are an online hater, you might be tempted to call a self-righteous punk with a coffee-house goatee. The endless press tour for “Marty Supreme,” for which Mr. Chalamet, now 30, earned his third best actor Oscar nomination in less than a decade, has revealed an altogether different sort of beast. It feels like a betrayal. Maybe he’s been doing a bit of cosplay as the film’s obnoxiously overconfident Marty Mauser, who aspires to be the best Ping-Pong player on earth. But it doesn’t feel like an act. It feels as though he is unabashedly showing his true colors..
He’s smug and entitled. He’s dismissive of opera and ballet. He’s Kardashian-adjacent. He’s saying things like, “It’s been like seven, eight years that I feel like I’ve been handing in really, really committed, top-of-the-line performances.” That was in an interview that drew backlash in December, in which he went on to say, “I don’t want people to take it for granted.” The new Timmy is through being modest and feels that his moment of glory is past due. Apparently, we owe it to him.
In the beginning, he did that thing cultural sensations do to blast off so quickly, which is to appeal to both women and gay men. President Trump had just been sworn in for the first time, #MeToo was everywhere, and terrible men were being toppled — and onto the scene wafted the delicate Mr. Chalamet. He was collectively embraced by our culture as a 21-year-old emo angel who promised, with his breakthrough performances, to deliver us from toxicity.
He sent millennial women into a frenzy as a brooding but gamin Jordan Catalano type in “Lady Bird,” opposite Saoirse Ronan, who described him to GQ as “feminine and sensitive and sensual.” The film’s director, Greta Gerwig, called him “a heartthrob but with thoroughbred acting chops,” comparing him to Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale and Daniel Day-Lewis. He became the quintessential cool girl’s crush, a not-yet-problematic fave.
More audacious was his turn as a lovesick puppy in Luca Guadagnino’s tender and sweltering “Call Me by Your Name,” based on André Aciman’s 2007 novel. The seemingly straight Mr. Chalamet played a teenager having an affair with an older man at a time when the representational ethics of that were subject to hot debate. But there was no arguing with ingénue Timmy or the sticky scene that launched a thousand peach emojis. Whether you giggled or cried as tears streamed down his face, the bracingly sentimental final shot is as bravura a display of male vulnerability as any captured on film.
Since then, Mr. Chalamet has reached a level of fame where he’s become like the air we breathe. Maybe we are guilty of taking him for granted. Did no one notice that he spent his 20s pouring his heart into prestige indies, learning to sing and dance as Willy Wonka and carrying the mammoth “Dune” franchise on his back? He’s worked with Wes Anderson (on “The French Dispatch”) and Martin Scorsese (on an ad for Chanel, for which the actor is a brand ambassador). He’s rapped with Pete Davidson on “Saturday Night Live.”
But with all this success has come a half-sneering swagger that’s flipped Mr. Chalamet’s initial appeal on its head. Gone is the androgyne king who posed on a Venice red carpet in a backless red Haider Ackermann halter top, looking like the chicest lesbian you know. In his place is some version of the bro we foolishly thought he was saving us from.
In interviews during those early years, Mr. Chalamet seemed anxiously attuned to how he would be perceived, eager to get things right. He insisted, with apparent self-awareness, that “the male brain doesn’t fully develop until 25” and that he “never acted with any sort of public image in mind,” which, he admitted, “freaks me out a little.” As it should. No one knows how to behave when fame suddenly hits.
Seeking fame on its own, and for the sake of it, is another matter. Here we have to address the matching orange outfits in the room: Mr. Chalamet’s romantic attachment, since 2023, to the professionally famous Kylie Jenner. It’s impossible not to consider the sort of smirking dude he’s become as it relates to the Kardashian cult of billionaire hyperfemininity. And could Ms. Jenner be partly to blame for his brazen thirst to harness the attention of celebrity into affirmation, only with an Academy Award instead of millions of hearts on Instagram? Maybe.
But Mr. Chalamet has always been ambitious — most talented and successful people are — so what is he being punished for? There was more than a hint of misogyny to the mob that dismissed Anne Hathaway, after her 2013 Oscar win for “Les Misérables,” as a try-hard, as though being a woman who sincerely wants anything was just so cringe. Male actors have always been granted more leeway to be insufferably earnest, on and off movie sets.
Still, many were put off when Mr. Chalamet said it plainly, accepting an award from the Screen Actors Guild last year, for his portrayal of Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown”: “I want to be one of the greats.” The desire to be thought of on the same level as Marlon Brando and Michael Phelps, whom he went on to name, is the kind of bravado that would impress any tech bro. Had this been an interview for an A.I. start-up, Mr. Chalamet would’ve been hired on the spot.
But while that tech bro might be right about A.I. taking over the world, maintaining some perspective in Hollywood — that making movies and being famous is really not that serious — has always been key to not coming off as a jerk. Mr. Chalamet sealed that fate for himself in a now infamous town hall where he recently broke another cardinal rule: punching down, from a pile of money, on art forms facing extinction-level money problems, when he implied that “no one cares” about opera and ballet.
What kind of movie star disses ballet? Apparently, the kind whose mother, sister and grandmother all danced as ballerinas. Any trace of soft boy Timmy still hiding beneath the weaselly sneer seems to have been snuffed out. What’s ironic is that the new toxic Timmy craves nothing more than to be met with the kind of immediate adoration that can come only from a live audience — applause. At this point, the best he can expect is a very slow clap.
Naveen Kumar is a critic and journalist. He is the associate director of the National Critics Institute.
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