Timothee Chalamet, known for starring in Denis Villeneuve’sDune films and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, has spoken about his weight-shaming experience. Chalamet, 28, talked about losing out on roles in significant films due to not having the right body.
Chalamet is due to star in the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. The film will be directed by James Mangold, who directed the Oscar-winning film Logan (2017) and its predecessor, The Wolverine (2013).
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Timothee Chalamet Is One of Today’s Biggest Stars
Chalamet, who is French-American, aspired to be a thespian by trade when he was young. Attending a professional school for acting, he broke onto the scene when he began his career on Law & Order. Chalamet recalled this as being a major breaktrhough, according to his teachers.
“I had a teacher who said that Law & Order was the mothership,” he said. “I raised my hand and asked, ‘Why is it the mothership?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s going to keep half of you [in the class] employed.”
Following booking this role, Chalamet had some small parts but no significant roles. He soon discovered that the barrier holding him back was his weight.
Chalamet said, “I wanted to be a big movie actor. But if I auditioned for The Maze Runner or Divergent things of that variety that were popping while I was coming up, the feedback was always ‘you don’t have the right body’. I had an agent that called me and said I had to put on weight.”
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The actor says that Chalamet helped her get in the right “headspace” for the audition.
Far from being forced to concede, the actor pursued his path to major stardom his way—without bending over to the will of executives. In the same interview, Chalamet discussed how he moved away from the major films and focused more on smaller-budget roles with more significant perspectives—Little Women, Beautiful Boy, and Ladybird, which the actor named as a few of these examples.
Over time, this has led to Chalamet becoming a well-known, if not slightly difficult-to-spell, household name. He’s played Paul Atreides in Dune, Willy Wonka in Wonka, and will soon play Bob Dylan. His story is one of success without deference to Hollywood standards of weight and image.
The story of executives, directors, and producers pressuring actors to lose weight is hardly new. In 2017, The Guardian published an article noting that weight loss as a form of breaking confidence and asserting control has been a tool within the acting industry for over a century.
With other projects, weight is still a significant factor in actors being offered a role. Joaquin Phoenix had to lose 52 pounds to play Arthur Fleck in Joker, something he swore never to do to himself again. The weight loss epidemic has even been commented on by long-running comedy animation South Park whose streaming special The End of Obesity ridiculed the craze of weight loss from the drug Ozempic.
Hollywood’s obsession with weight negatively impacts actors and the audience they perform for. While Chalamet has been incredibly successful in gaining roles, plenty of actors feel compelled to follow unhealthy diets for the sake of appearances. Chalamet’s career, which has been characterized by looking for roles that suit him rather than suiting himself to roles, has made him such a major star and is an example worth following.
Chalamet’s due to star in the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. His performances in Dune and Dune Part Two can be streamed on Max.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Original title: Dune: Part One.
A noble family becomes embroiled in a war for control over the galaxy’s most valuable asset while its heir becomes troubled by visions of a dark future.
- Director
- Denis Villeneuve
- Release Date
- October 22, 2021
- Cast
- Dave Bautista , Rebecca Ferguson , Sharon Duncan-Brewster , Jason Momoa , David Dastmalchian , Stephen McKinley Henderson , Stellan Skarsgård , Charlotte Rampling , Chang Chen , Oscar Isaac , Zendaya , Javier Bardem , Timothee Chalamet , Josh Brolin
- Writers
- Frank Herbert , Eric Roth , Denis Villeneuve , Jon Spaihts
- Runtime
- 155 minutes
- Production Company
- Studio(s)
- Legendary Pictures
- Distributor(s)
- Warner Bros. Pictures
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