An assessment of Chalamet’s sex appeal as he steps into the role of Willy Wonka.
There’s Something About Timothée
Six years ago, he became the most in-demand young actor in Hollywood. What makes him so irresistible?
Illustration: Humberto Cruz; Photo: Karwai Tang/Getty Images There’s Something About Timothée
Six years ago, he became the most in-demand young actor in Hollywood. What makes him so irresistible?
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In 2017, E. Alex Jung declared that “Male Stars Are Too Buff!” On the heels of that, a young Timothée Chalamet entered the popular consciousness via Call Me by Your Name. The public appraised him; people took in his long, lean limbs, his “alabaster skin” (Vogue’s phrase), the alien angularity of his facial structure, and, rather than say “Wow, this kid should 100 percent be cast as Colin in a remake of The Secret Garden,” they said, “This is the heartthrob we’ve been waiting for.” He was the antidote to the Marvel-led glut of synthetic, bulging muscles that looked like CGI but were real and the brute brand of masculinity associated with that type of body.
Blended with Chalamet’s otherwise standard-issue heartthrob characteristics (white, cis, floppy ’90s hair, pouty lips), all this led to an explosion of heartthrob idolatry: Vogue declared that he was “ushering in a new era of masculinity”; I-D magazine hailed him as “the Perfect Heartthrob for 2018”; another headline singled out his eyes, stating “Timothée Chalamet’s Sex Eyes Are the Spice of Life.” It took no time at all — he was the Internet Boyfriend Supreme by the end of 2019. The fandom materialized and grew to full “Chalamania.” Fans made slow-motion memes of his open-mouthed, torso-winding dancing in Call Me by Your Name and Photoshopped his face onto great works of art on the ChalametInArt Instagram account. The overwhelming allure wasn’t just his looks. It was, as one megafan who waited hours to spot him on the red carpet of the 2022 Venice Film Festival put it, his gentle personality. “It feels nice to have a Gen-Z star who seems genuinely nice, whom we can all look up to,” she told Variety. Fans were drawn in by his emotional intelligence and seeming sweetness and sensitivity. It felt like they could rely on him to always make the interesting choice (in love interests, famous friends, roles, red-carpet fits).
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His fandom was so successful in making him a “heartthrob” that the label is impossible to extract from his brand. But does a horde of die-hard stans anointing someone an Internet Boyfriend make him an actual sex symbol with all the onscreen heat, eye-fucking, and innate ability to seduce an entire audience that comes with it? Now, Chalamet is poised to star as Willy Wonka, perhaps one of the most sexless characters ever put to screen. Any actor who dares to don the chocolate-maker’s top hat knows there is no way to make the character fuckable; the role becomes a stress test of their sexiness. (One might argue the slight menace Gene Wilder injected into his 1971 version almost got us there, but one is arguing that in private with her therapist.) Is Chalamet enough of a sex symbol to engage in earnest singing, dancing, and candy-making and continue to make loins throb? Is his sex appeal strong enough to withstand bathing in this vat of cringe, or will the role reveal he was never truly a sex symbol to begin with?
In his early parts, Chalamet represented a variation on the boy you might have wanted to date in high school. He so naturally embodied Elio in Call Me by Your Name it was hard to imagine he wasn’t just like him — sensitive and intellectual, stumbling through a life-shifting sexual coming of age on colt’s legs; a tender soul willing to have his heart broken just as long as he got to love. He had a horniness so potent it could lead him to defile fruit (the fact that we debated eating “the peach” — you can’t teach that kind of fuckability). Elio simultaneously embodied the man everybody wants to fuck and the overlooked manic pixie dream boy who never gets the guy (except this once), sexy and relatable at the same time. In the movies that followed, Chalamet continued to play the object of someone’s affection, and it’s in these roles that his sex appeal is clearest. In Lady Bird, he was the thinking woman’s moody, pretentious high-school crush, built for someone to yearn for and just dismissive enough of said yearning that it only begot more yearning. In Little Women, he was the thinking woman’s period-piece crush but also a classic romantic who longed for “our Jo” with such determined focus that, of course, we swooned for him with equal fervor. In each movie, his tendrils fell dreamily. In each, he was pined for by a woman, and the audience vicariously pined for him, too.
But as Chalamet has become a bigger star, he’s moved further away from roles that hinge on his being a love interest. It’s easy to project fuckability on an actor as they dry-hump pillows against the backdrop of the sun-soaked Italian countryside. It’s harder to maintain that illusion in a film like The King, in which Chalamet played a Henry V coming of age amid medieval filth and politics. Were there sex scenes? Sure, but his bowl cut and dreary Middle Ages pallor did little to stir up the same lusty feelings his first major roles had. His role in The French Dispatch further shifted the focus away (even the hottest person alive would have to be flattened to blend in with the Wes Anderson aesthetic), putting the emphasis on his quirkiness and facility with a zany one-liner. As ducal heir Paul Atreides in Dune, Chalamet became a full franchise star, and his character’s romance with Chani (Zendaya) is poised to take center stage in part two of the series. The romance, however, is prophetic, not born of sex or longing. Chalamet as Paul feels distant amid the spectacle; he’s serious, internal, sometimes cold. Yes, he stalks the dunes looking like a Rick Owens model, but sex appeal is so not the point.
No movie made Chalamet’s waning status as a sex symbol clearer to me, though, than Bones and All, a film about a pair of young cannibals on the run. It was his return to the Luca Guadagnino universe that made him the Internet Boyfriend of our fantasies. His character, Lee, seemed like a darker variation of Elio — artistic and sensitive, feral and sexual, kinky, a little bit of a fuckboy but also one who just needed love. Yet something no longer fit. The role called for heat. To turn a cannibal into a heartthrob requires a sort of boiling passion he didn’t embody — the romance was so restrained, the chemistry so dampened, it all became sort of dull. I didn’t feel compelled to shout “You could eat me!” as I’d imagined I would.
I’d argue it’s often the features that contribute to the idea of Chalamet’s sex appeal that can make him a bit of a goober in reality. Real World Timmy and Internet Boyfriend Timmy infamously clashed in 2019 when images surfaced of him ravenously making out with Lily-Rose Depp on a yacht. Suddenly, all those things that made him “sexy” (alabaster skin, elegant long limbs, alien angularity) became wet, pale, skinny arms awkwardly akimbo. Offscreen, his fans have tended to turn on him in moments when they’re faced with images that puncture the romantic ideal of him as a sensitive high-school crush. Consider the reactions to the Chalamet and Kylie Jenner union, which led to a stan meltdown of staggering proportions. In the days after they attended a Beyoncé concert together, fans couldn’t believe their relationship wasn’t a practical joke or a mass hallucination. At the root of this disbelief was the idea that our Timothée would not want to date Kylie. Kylie was the choice a regular man, not a subversive male celebrity, would make. In some ways, his appeal was always less about what he did on- or offscreen and more about what electing him as an Internet Boyfriend said about our cultural progress. It felt good to be part of a hive mind that was evolved enough to thirst after a feminine, twink icon whose heart broke just like ours.
So perhaps Wonka is coming at the perfect time in his evolution as an actor. It might just be Chalamet’s sledgehammer to the whole Internet Boyfriend enterprise. If so, I say go forth, Chalamet, and leave your heartthrob days behind.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the December 4, 2023, issue of New York Magazine.
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