Timothée Chalamet is one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation, so let’s go through his film career and count down his top 10 best movie performances!
They say the movie star has been dying out for a while now. But if any actor in their prime is proof that there will still be a few kicking in the generations to come, it may be Timothée Chalamet. (Or maybe it’s Tom Cruise, since he’ll probably outlive us all if he survived eight Mission: Impossible movies.) Chalamet is one of those actors where no matter how well the film around him pans out, he always brings something unique and extremely watchable to it. So, with him currently in the award season conversation yet again, now seems like the perfect time to look over just how strong his career has been by counting down his top 10 best performances.
When Timothée Chalamet is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is probably the type of subdued, quietly troubled youth that he’s most well-known for playing in a handful of films. But while he very easily could’ve been boxed into that one note, his filmography has also seen him play brash punks, outspoken rebels, and even domineering forces to be reckoned with … sometimes all at once! I initially planned on only covering 5 films, but there were honestly too many roles that I didn’t want to leave out in summing up his career.
What makes Chalamet so good that he tempts me to join the dreaded world of stan culture? Let’s find out as we go through the top 10 best Timothée Chalamet movie performances!
10. Dune
When I was starting to put this list together, I didn’t think Timothée Chalamet’s first outing in the Dune franchise would make the cut. But the more I think about it, the more I admire the impact he has on the story and how we perceive his character. In the far future, Paul Atreides (Chalamet) travels with his royal family to a desert planet to harvest its precious resources, only to find it’s part of a trap to wipe them all out. Like many Chalamet characters to come, Paul is a brooding, soft-spoken figure, and that could have caused him to slip into monotonous territory with just the slightest miscalculations.
But thanks to Timothée’s way of holding himself and speaking, you catch on very quickly that he’s not unfeeling as much as he’s burdened by the weight of his role as heir to his Duke father (Oscar Isaac). Not to mention wary of a prophecy foretelling his greatness as a messiah. It’s fascinating to watch him analyze his every surrounding, only occasionally indulging in his own youth, trying so hard to hold himself together through painful trials and losses. It’s rare that he lets his inner rage explode, which makes such moments incredibly jarring and even kind of hard to watch. With how massive Dune is in its visuals and story, Chalamet’s ability to still stand out despite such an internalized performance is nothing short of impressive.
9. Little Women
This is definitely a performance that, like the movie itself, sneaks up on you with how deceptively layered it is. In Little Women, Chalamet plays Laurie, the neighbor of our four female leads whose lives and relationships in 1800s Massachusetts are at the center of the film. As years go by, Laurie finds himself in a love square between the fiercely independent Jo (Saoirse Ronan), the conflicted Amy (Florence Pugh), and Amy’s fiancée (Dash Barber). Yes, we have a love square on our hands. And an actual good one for a change, thanks in part to Chalamet’s efforts.
Though Laurie is initially introduced as a hooligan, we’re taken through his history with the little women and shown that, like everyone in the film, the time period’s rigid culture of love and marriage causes him great emotional confusion. He has feelings for both Jo and Amy, and as they both reject him for different reasons, you see his hurt become increasingly visible, with Timothée’s performance reaching a crescendo during a desperate proposal to Jo. Both the acting and writing make it clear that he’s a heartfelt, earnest person trying to navigate through his own feelings, and Chalamet hits the perfect note of a genuinely lovestruck young man without making him outright pathetic. In a movie centered around women, it says a lot that the most prominent man could leave such a memorable impression.
8. The French Dispatch
I’ll shamefully admit that I’m not really a fan of the acting style in Wes Anderson movies, but even I can’t deny the charm Timothée Chalamet brings to this anthology film about three stories published in the French Dispatch magazine’s final issue. He plays Zeffirelli, a student taking part in raging university protests and a hookup for journalist Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) as she covers the story and even helps with his manifesto. Zeffirelli is a rather talkative individual because, y’know, Wes Anderson, but Chalamet effortlessly swims through the character’s musings as someone who takes what he does seriously but still has plenty of time for recklessness.
The highlight of the performance is when Zeffirelli debates the contents of his manifesto with another student. In his own quirky way, you can see his passion boiling over, yet he’s dignified and confident enough to have you drawn in and, at least in the moment, in agreement with everything he says. It’s again commendable that Chalamet brings that authenticity into what could have been either too pretentious or too foolhardy a character for us to like. It’s also the second Timothée Chalamet performance on this top 10 list to have him involved in a love polygon. Would you believe that it isn’t the last?
7. Wonka
As a prequel to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Wonka is probably the least acclaimed film here. I myself don’t care much for it. But Chalamet, who plays the titular Wonka as he strives to open a chocolate shop, is at absolutely no fault for his performance. Does it line up with the feel of Gene Hackman’s Wonka from the original? Not quite. But as its own thing, Chalamet’s work is as dynamic, energized, and upbeat as we’ve probably ever seen from him. Wonka’s offbeat whimsy is thicker than me after gorging myself on dark chocolate, and Chalamet has to take the reins as the front-and-center human embodiment of that tone. But he also needs to convey legitimate emotion as Wonka is down on his luck and striving to make his deceased mother (Sally Hawkins) proud.
Being as expressive and childlike as Wonka and not having it come across as grating must be extremely difficult, and it’s surreal to see an actor as typically restrained as Timothée Chalamet pull it off so effortlessly, right down to the larger-than-life gestures and mannerisms. He straight-up is Willy Wonka here, and the film would completely fall apart if its lead actor had done a lesser job. Whether he’s softly sentimental or boisterously crowd-pleasing, Chalamet digs to the sweet, nuggety center of this candy-coated role and provides a delicious, creamy burst of chocolate wonder that blesses your taste buds with- okay, I think I’m just hungry now.
6. Call Me By Your Name
Here it is: the breakout role that got Timothée Chalamet his first Oscar nomination. Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name is about a passionate summer fling between 17-year-old Elio (Chalamet) and 24-year-old Oliver (Armie Hammer) in 1980s Italy, with the reclusive Elio grappling with feelings he’s now experiencing for the first time. Chalamet thrives on his subtlety here, more than in any other performance of his. Elio is presented as blatantly introverted but capable of very intense emotions under the surface, and the more you peel back the layers of those emotions, the more you’re forced to understand him just through how he holds himself.
The film portrays its romantic relationship as equally beautiful and damaging for Elio, who’s not used to his own experiences and definitely not at the age where he can properly handle exactly what Oliver had in mind. Call Me by Your Name never spells that out for you until it nears its end, but Chalamet does such a good job getting that innocence across. It’s only at the very end of the movie where the consequences of the ill-fated love affair truly hit him, and I believe that elongated stretch of uncut acting from Chalamet could have earned his Oscar nomination entirely by itself. My only gripe is that I don’t fully believe his infatuation with Oliver before they actually come together, and that the performance is a bit too downplayed until that point. But that doesn’t stop this role from speaking so impressively loudly despite being so quiet.
5. The King
Though definitely not one of Chalamet’s most well-known performances, it’s one of his most unique. He is the titular King Henry V of England, who is thrust into the role of king and sets out to invade France after a mysterious attempt on its part to assassinate him. Director David Michôd’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Henriad is dark, bleak, and ominous, as is Timothée Chalamet’s lead performance. To my knowledge, this was his first time playing a character of this magnitude, and as a precursor to how he’d later fare as Paul Atreides, he once again makes masterful use of subdued brooding to get across boiling, buried passion.
What makes his work in The King so distinct for Chalamet is that his character constantly has to maintain an exterior of unshakeable strength, no matter what inner turmoil he’s facing. As the war takes its toll on him, Henry V needs to precisely choose when to trust his allies with his vulnerable feelings and when to show himself as the great king of his people, all while letting the audience always know how grim his thoughts are getting. This includes his intimidation factor, which Chalamet also brings through fight sequences or just in his low vocal assertions that he is in control, the latter of which is at its peak in the film’s conclusion. He can even do a decent British accent! If you think this typical heartthrob of an actor can’t pull off power, then this is the movie to prove you wrong … along with another to come.
4. Bones And All
The second Luca Guadagnino-directed film on this list, Bones and All is about Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Chalamet), a pair of cannibals who become romantically involved on a road trip to find Maren’s long-lost mother (Chloë Sevigny). Part romance and part horror, Bones and All has us frequently questioning how much we can get behind Lee as a character given his morbid nature and choices. It’s one thing for him to be taking lives out of necessity to feed himself. But he’s got such a cold, roguish, darkly sly way of carrying himself that it almost looks like he’s numb to and perfectly okay with this way of life … almost.
I’ve said this quite a bit, but Chalamet excels at bearing his character’s hurt to us with the simplest of glances and inflections. What makes this performance stand out is how closely he pushes us into being outright afraid of him, only to then pull us right back onto his side, especially as Maren challenges how much he can live the way he has up until now. This was also a chance for Chalamet to get gruesome, nasty, and disgusting at several points, so much so that my Wonka-induced hunger has been ruined just by thinking about it. In a film filled with terror, Timothée Chalamet does scarily good work at making you look like he could be the villain, but showing there’s still a heartfelt soul weeping underneath.
3. A Complete Unknown
I swear, my love of Bob Dylan has nothing to do with this performance being this high … Okay, it mostly doesn’t. A Complete Unknown is the portrayal of Dylan (Chalamet) from his arrival to New York in 1961 to his embrace of electric instruments in 1965. It goes without saying that portraying someone as simultaneously iconic and mysterious as Bob Dylan would be a daunting tightrope walk for anyone. You need to transform your very essence enough to impersonate a legend, without coming across like a caricature or a pale imitation, but also without letting people see too deeply into your soul in order to keep the mystique intact. Oh, and you also have to sound like Dylan and sing about as well.
So, when Timothée Chalamet pulls all that off with such an unbelievably magnetic aura, fully convincing you that he is the man, the myth, the legend in the flesh, it has to go down as one of his absolute best performances. Every single word he says, every shot of him sitting there like he owns the room without even wanting to own the room, sells you 100% on Dylan being as humbly influential as he’s shown in the film. The performance says so much yet so little about who and what Dylan is. It lets you peek into a door that barely opens, but it leaves you so mesmerized that you’re okay with not seeing more. Chalamet even did all the singing live on set, and it’s genuinely a little creepy how well he replicates the real singer’s voice. It’s hard to describe the pitch-perfect nature of the performance any further, which perhaps is all too fitting for what it represents.
2. Dune: Part Two
This is by far Chalamet’s biggest role in every sense possible. Following up on Dune, he again plays Paul Atreides, who joins the desert-dwelling Fremen to take revenge on his father’s killers, while forced to choose his path as his foretold destiny draws near. It may seem strange to call a more action-oriented performance one of his best, but this role demands more out of Chalamet than any other. On top of once again getting across so much of his thought process through visual silence, Paul in this film transforms from a desert newcomer to a scrappy fighter, then a lover to one of the Fremen (Zendaya), then a leader who is horrified by his purpose, and then a leader who accepts that purpose with thunderous, booming power the likes of which I had no idea Chalamet was capable of until this point.
Really think about what a ridiculous range that requires. Chalamet may have boosted up the first Dune, but he owns this one. He can be charmingly earnest and even funny one moment, then fiercely aggressive the next. What makes the performance even more complex is the mystery of how much Paul truly buys into his own legend and mission of revenge. Is he wholly reluctant the whole time, does he start that way but then come to actively want it, or are those two sides always at war? Anyone can watch him and potentially come to a different conclusion … while they’re not being scared sh*tless of him glaring daggers at his foes. Dune: Part Two sees Timothée Chalamet juggling more than he ever has, showcasing the down-to-earth nature of a child, the authority of a Duke, and the somber uncertainty of a messiah. It’s a successfully huge effort at the center of a successfully huge movie.
1. Beautiful Boy
As demanding as all his other performances must have been, none of them hit quite the exact same highs as this powerhouse. Beautiful Boy is a biographical drama based on the memoirs of David Sheff and his son Nic Sheff. Steve Carrell plays David, whose relationship with Nic (Chalamet) is strained by the latter’s volatile battle with severe drug addiction. Just as it looks like Nic is on the right path, each relapse is more brutal to watch than the last. Not that such a thing would be comfortable viewing in anyone’s hands, but Chalamet brings 110% of his chops to every unsettling thought, every bittersweet talk with his father, every denial of the depths of his crisis, and of course every disastrous collapse.
Portraying drug addiction is a slippery slope. It can very easily look exploitative or overblown without the proper touch. And while Beautiful Boy as a whole doesn’t always succeed there, Chalamet always does. I consider this his best work because not only does he again need to bring his full range to the table, but it’s also him at his most outwardly emotionally damaged, visibly shaken, and overall expressive. Yet never once does he get too showy or feel like he wants you to notice his performance. He also works wonderfully opposite Carrell and everyone else, feeding off their own distraught states and impeccably matching – or deliberately clashing with – every single actor’s beats.
It must be a massive challenge to portray heartbroken teens, beloved characters, and historical icons. But playing someone who, to this day, is fighting a battle that far too many people have fought, and representing that harsh reality to a T, is about as tough a task as I can imagine. For that reason, Beautiful Boy stands as the best Timothée Chalamet performance.
