At a party recently, a friend posed a question I’d never heard before. “Have you been blimp-fluenced yet?” she asked me.
“Blimp-fluenced?” I replied.
“You know, the Timothée Chalamet blimp,” she clarified.
Ah, yes, of course I knew the Timothée Chalamet blimp. It’s the streak of orange that’s been hovering over Los Angeles for weeks with the title of Chalamet’s new film, Marty Supreme, emblazoned across its side. I’d spotted it once, appearing like a thought bubble above the Hollywood sign. Chalamet—or, at least, the braggadocious version of himself in a video he posted on Instagram last month—had pitched the airship as part of his master plan to make the movie “one of the most important things that happens on planet Earth this year.” In an 18-minute staged Zoom session with the film’s marketing team, he proposed drenching landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty in orange paint. And not just any orange: “Hard-core orange, corroded orange, falling-apart orange, rusted orange,” he explained.
The whole scheme is stupidly brilliant and brilliantly stupid, emblematic of just how unusual Marty Supreme’s rollout—and Chalamet’s press-tour persona—has been. The actor began cultivating his eccentric approach to marketing this time last year, while promoting the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. Back then, he defied expectations of a movie star headlining an Oscar-courting drama: He popped up at his own look-alike contest, rode a Lime bike onto a red carpet, and used his acceptance speech at the Screen Actors Guild Awards to emphasize his ambition to become “one of the greats.” Now he’s gone beyond generating headlines for his idiosyncrasy. Chalamet’s M.O. thus far has been to make everything about Marty Supreme, and Marty Supreme only: He’s been dressing almost exclusively in orange—excuse me, “hard-core orange”—or in the limited supply of Marty Supreme merchandise. He appears at events flanked by an army of Ping-Pong-ball-headed foot soldiers; the film is about a flashy Ping-Pong player, so the surreal (and slightly terrifying) costume tracks. The Statue of Liberty has not been doused in orange, but it might as well be.
[Read: The celebrity look-alike contest boom]
What Chalamet has been doing feels defiantly risky. Amid a fresh round of Oscar buzz for his performance in Marty Supreme, Chalamet is actively rejecting the contender playbook. Instead, he’s cementing himself as a one-man marketing machine, unabashed about his attention-seeking and box-office dreams. Forget the glitzy galas considered essential stops for awards hopefuls; even when he appears on late-night TV, shows up on the cover of Vogue, or participates in a Q&A sponsored by Vanity Fair, Chalamet turns his Marty Supreme talk into a vehicle for self-aggrandizement. That discussion often includes emphasizing how badly he wants to be respected for his body of work—an admission that’s usually considered gauche. Somehow, though, Chalamet has skirted major repercussions for his cockiness. That’s in part because he’s a young man embodying the familiar archetype of the egotistical striver, and in part because he has the talent to back his claims; he’s received two Oscar nominations before turning 30. But if anything, his off-screen tactics lately prove that he’s the rare current A-lister who can manage a tricky balancing act: seeming spontaneous while being extremely, obviously calculated. He’s effortful, even if what he’s doing to cultivate his public image appears effortless.
It helps that Chalamet’s most obnoxious endeavors could be seen as extensions of Marty Mauser, his Marty Supreme character. Marty is a gifted-yet-arrogant man so convinced of his own eminence, he spirals into a vortex of self-destruction. The actor’s promotional work might as well be called “the Marty Mauser method”: He jangles people’s nerves by making boastful declarations—“It’s been like seven, eight years that I’ve been handing in really, really committed top-of-the-line performances,” he said recently—that sometimes attract backlash. But much like Marty, Chalamet seems untroubled by naysayers. The more brash he becomes, the more Chalamet blurs the line between himself and his character. As Chalamet told The Hollywood Reporter, Marty “is who I was before I had a career.” Squint, and the actor’s most off-putting moves could be attributed to his commitment to the grind, which could then encourage audiences to go see the results in action.
Chalamet talks openly about how he wants to lean into provocation despite the danger of doing so. “At worst, you’ve rubbed people the wrong way,” he told Vogue. “And at best, someone will get pulled in and go, ‘Hey, this guy really thinks this thing’s worthy.’” His stunts, carefully curated though they may be, seem to genuinely align with his interests. He’s terminally online, so he knew how to make a parody of a Zoom meeting meme-able. He loves hip-hop, so he danced to Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” onstage. None of this came across like they’d been pitched by a team of publicists; rather, they seemed like the product of someone giddily checking items off a personal bucket list.
[Read: Bob Dylan broke rules. A Complete Unknown follows them.]
Conventional wisdom dictates that a performer hoping to be taken seriously by his peers and the public has to take himself seriously; think sober post-screening talkbacks, not silly bits with blimps. Manufactured setups can backfire easily, as Joaquin Phoenix’s unsettling appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman did in 2009. But many of Chalamet’s efforts bring to mind those of pop stars. Unlike actors drawing a line between their private life and their characters, singers often invite intense scrutiny of both their work and themselves—scrutiny they can then use to their advantage. Chalamet’s matching orange movie-premiere outfits with his girlfriend, Kylie Jenner, for example, echo Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake’s denim wardrobe in the early 2000s; wearing eye-searing hues together produces tabloid fodder, while further anchoring Chalamet in the cultural zeitgeist. His choice to so closely blend his personality with his career resembles a lyricist writing diaristic songs, encouraging a sense of kinship between him and his audience. The outcome is a deliberate impression of intimacy, mixed with an appealing vulnerability. That makes Chalamet the movie star for this social-media-obsessed, parasocial-relationship-building moment: He understands that he can generate viral content with his personality alone, keeping him in not just the so-called awards conversation, but the cultural one at large.
Even genuine passion for a film on the awards track can descend into repetitive sound bites and rote red-carpet appearances. But Chalamet seems to be having the time of his life, even when he’s strapped to the top of the Las Vegas Sphere and cawing at nothing but a drone zooming away from his face. In a culture full of endless distraction, he’s doing all he can to make himself an easy-to-follow focal point, like an orange blimp on the horizon. His enthusiasm is unmissable—and thoroughly infectious.
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