Timothée Chalamet Says He ‘Wept For Hours’ After High-Pressure Audition

Timothée Chalamet Image by Getty Images

By Jenny Singer October 8, 2018

Timothée Chalamet took an industrial drill to our hearts with his performance in “Call Me By Your Name” and looks posed to do the same in the upcoming “Beautiful Boy” with Steve Carell. So it’s good to know that Tim cries, too.

Human china-doll Chalamet is no longer a rising star. A more apt metaphor might be a luminous, opalescent moon the public gazes at in great wonder. The 22-year-old Jewish actor’s combination of bird-boned physicality and emotiveness won audiences hearts last year in two Oscar nominated films — “Call Me” as well as “Lady Bird” — but Chalamet doesn’t always win.

In an interview with Time Out London, the young star spoke candidly about the painful process of auditions and rejection. Asked if his workload is ever overwhelming, he responded, “I’d rather be stressed out over how much work I’m doing than sitting in an apartment on 163rd Street and Grand Concourse in the Bronx, waiting for the phone to ring. Or taping an audition for “The Neon Demon” that I rehearsed for a week and sent in, and they didn’t respond. Or for “The Theory of Everything” or “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”.”

And even before those fateful phone calls, the process of going out, again and again, for roles is grating. Chalamet said of high-pressure auditions, “I don’t deal with them – I don’t know how. Please tell me how. ‘White Boy Rick’ is a movie that’s coming out. I wept for hours after doing that audition.”

via GIPHY

Wept for hours! About “White Boy Rick”! A Matthew McConaughey movie that got a 58% from Rotten Tomatoes! Even Timothée Chalamet doesn’t always get what he wants.

Jenny Singer is the deputy lifestyle editor for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Jenny Singer is a freelance writer with pieces in Vox, the Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Teen Vogue, and more. She was previously a staff writer at Glamour and the Forward, and she’s currently getting an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa.

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