Timothée Chalamet recalled the time an agent asked him to gain weight. The actor told this anecdote on the show “The Zane Lowe Interview “Series” for Apple Music.
An agent once asked Timothée Chalamet to gain weight.
It was early in his career and the actor compared, during a conversation for Apple Music’s “The Zane Lowe Interview Series” on Monday, his experience in Hollywood to the way Bob Dylan forged his own path in as a musician in Minnesota in the late 1950s.
Timothée Chalamet stars as the musician in the biopic “A Complete Unknown,” which he also produced and which is released in January 2025.
“If I auditioned for ‘The Labyrinth’ or ‘Divergent,’ movies like that that were all the rage when I was young, I would always be told, ‘Oh, you don’t have the right body,'” he said. he explained. “An agent called me and said, ‘You need to gain weight,’ basically – not in an aggressive way, but you know. I found my way in these very personalized films. For Dylan, it was folk music. He couldn’t keep a rock and roll band because they would all have been hired by other kids who had more money, literally, in Minnesota.”
Instead of gaining weight and auditioning for blockbusters, the star chose more private films, like “Call Me by Your Name” in 2017 and “Little Women” in 2019.
“They were smaller budget, but very – I don’t know how else to put it – personal films that started in that theatrical space. That’s where I found my rhythm, my confidence, my flow, whatever you want to call it,” he said.
Recently, Timothée Chalamet played the lead role in several big-budget films, including 2021 sci-fi film “Dune” and its sequel, “Dune Part II,” as well as Willy Wonka in “Wonka,” in 2023.
Between the “Dune” sequel and “Wonka,” the star starred in two films that grossed more than $200 million at the U.S. box office in a span of eight months, breaking the record set by John Travolta, he 45 years ago, when he headlined “Grease” and “Saturday Night Fever.”
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