A Sobering Awards Season Pivot
Timothée Chalamet’s promotional campaign for his new film Marty Supreme has been a little unconventional thus far. Staged Zoom sessions. Promotional blimp work. A lot of chatter about a jacket nobody can buy. When Chalamet did The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, he was flanked by an entourage of people with giant orange ping-pongs for heads. The strategy has worked—the film is doing well at the box office—but Chalamet’s energy has vibed uncomfortably with the fusty atmosphere of awards season campaigning, where glad-handing with showbiz retirees and eating rubber chicken at galas is still very much the norm.
Chalamet seems to have clocked that dissonance, and his speech at tonight’s Golden Globes (where he won for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy) was tellingly subdued despite the show’s notoriety for messy, drunken speech-giving. “My dad instilled in me a spirit of gratitude growing up: Always be grateful for what you have,” he said, after tossing off a few jokes about the movie’s crowded cast and the presence of Shark Tank’s “Mr. Wonderful,” Kevin O’Leary, who plays a villainous businessman in Marty Supreme. “It’s allowed me to leave this ceremony in the past empty-handed, my head held high, grateful just to be here, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say those moments didn’t make this moment that much sweeter.”
It was a perfectly lovely sentiment that just sounded a tad jarring coming from a celebrity who has been delightfully un-humble over the years. After some noteworthy supporting turns as a teen actor, Chalamet burst to fame at the age of 21 with Call Me By Your Name. Since then, he has grown into a unique A-lister, finding a variety of big-budget projects that fit his skinny frame and delicate screen presence, among them the Dune films, Wonka, and the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. He has every reason to swagger, but that’s just not something that happens at award shows, where faux-humble surprise is always the order of the day.
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That’s what made Chalamet’s tactics last year, when he was campaigning for A Complete Unknown, stick out so sorely. “I know we’re in a subjective business, but the truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness,” he said when he won the SAG Award for Best Actor. “I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats.” He then threw out some names that inspire him: Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando, Viola Davis, Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps. It was memorable stuff, but Oscar pundits pointed out that while Chalamet was yapping like an ESPN talking head, his rival Adrien Brody was working Hollywood parties. Brody, eventually, ended up with the Oscar for his turn in The Brutalist.
With Chalamet’s aggressive and surreal approach to selling Marty Supreme, it looked like he was staying true to himself, whether or not Oscar voters could handle it. But then at last week’s Critics Choice Awards (another televised show that serves as an Oscar predictor), a slightly more demure Chalamet took the stage upon winning Best Actor. He thanked his fellow nominees by name; he thanked Marty Supreme’s director Josh Safdie; he thanked his partner, Kylie Jenner, saying, “I love you. I couldn’t do this without you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
Classic stuff—and the kind of stuff he’s avoided. Chalamet didn’t really spotlight Jenner during last year’s awards tour, but this year she’s been front and center, getting another thank-you during the Globes speech. Gone is the lovably hyped-up guy pitching exasperated marketing executives about blimp rentals. In the parlance of political thinking, he’s now pivoting to the center after winning the primary. Given that his most major competition in Best Actor is probably coming from Leonardo DiCaprio, the star of One Battle After Another, it makes some historical sense, too. DiCaprio didn’t win an Oscar for decades, missing for hits like The Aviator, Blood Diamond, and The Wolf of Wall Street. When he finally collected, for The Revenant, it was by contritely playing the awards season game, going to the dinners, and giving many dutiful speeches acknowledging the work he’d done to get to this moment. Now, it might be Chalamet’s turn to do the same.