Timothée Chalamet’s 12 best films, ranked
The New Yorker is at the vanguard of young actors defining early-21st century cinema. Here, we rank his filmography
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TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET has a resumé full of bangers. In a career that started in his years at LaGuardia High School (the New York performing arts school that’s produced the likes of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Adrien Brody) – famously rapping about statistics to get an A – Chalamet has appeared in everything, from bankable blockbusters to indies and art house flicks. In other words, your film buff friend’s favourite movies of the past decade.
The New York actor’s first taste of the types of films he wanted to make came when Christopher Nolan cast him in Interstellar. It laid the groundwork of balancing a grand epic and with a well-written screenplay, something sparse by today’s standards, as it seems. But his breakout roles came back to back in 2017, starring in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, and a then-relatively unknown Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. In the years since, Chalamet has joined a coterie of actors that are defining early-21st century cinema, a new kind of movie star that can bring a diverse audience to the box office. And as his filmography expands, Chalamet has been selective about choosing idiosyncratic characters to bring to the big screen, his most recent being table tennis iconoclast Marty Reisman in Marty Supreme.
While a recent spate of opera and ballet-related controversy may have put a damper on his Oscars campaign, Chalamet has a good chance of taking home his first golden statuette for Best Actor at the 98th Academy Awards. So, in anticipation of such an honour, we visiteded Chalamet’s growing body of work and undertook the difficult task of ranking his best films.
Worthy mentions that didn’t make the list include The King (2019) and Hostiles (2017), which, while good films, aren’t as memorable as the others on this list. While others, such as Woody Allen’s 2019 A Rainy Day in New York, are forgettable (on account of the director).
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12. Willy Wonka, Wonka (2023)
HERE’S A BIT of trivia: Chalamet’s dating history includes Lily Rose Depp . . . the daughter of Johnny Depp, who famously played chocolate mogul Willy Wonka in the 2005 Roald Dahl adaptation. It’s a reverse Oedipal complex that had the world even more delighted to see Chalamet don the chocolatier’s top hat. But as remakes go, Chalamet’s Wonka is vastly different from Depp’s, playing a younger version of the character as he arrives on the scene with a briefcase full of dreams to build a sweets empire (with musical numbers to match). So this isn’t a Wonka with the severe pallor and bob haircut diligently tended to like a bonsai tree, or the dark humour of Gene Wilder; this is an upstart that’s full of whimsy, a different muscle to see the usually dramatic actor flex.
Did Timothée Chalamet sing in Wonka?
He sure did. In addition to his major film credits across multiple genres, and working with blockbuster to arty auteurs, Chalamet is a triple-threat. The actor’s real vocals feature in six of the film’s songs on the soundtrack, which includes:
- ‘A Hatful of Dreams’
- ‘You’ve Never Had Chocolate Like This’
- ‘For a Moment’
- ‘A World of Your Own’
- ‘Sorry, Noodle’
- ‘Pure Imagination’
11. Zeffirelli, The French Dispatch (2021)
Art house directors like to pick from a coterie of actors they might’ve seen in another like-minded director’s film. It’s kind of like a referral. The French Dispatch is Chalamet’s debut Wes Anderson film. Playing a student revolutionary with a mind for chess and a hand always holding a cigarette, it’s a perfect match of what Anderson asks of his adult actors: to be child-like in a know-it-all way. Chalamet clocks in at about 20-minutes of screen time, but it’s the kind of work we hope to see again between the actor and director.
10. Yule, Don’t Look Up (2021)
When the world is ending, would you want to spend it with Timothée Chalamet? With eight and a half minutes of total screen time in Adam McKay’s disaster disaster flick Don’t Look Up, Chalamet certainly made an impression. Featuring alongside Jennifer Lawrence’s Kate Dibiasky, you wouldn’t think much of his character, Yule, a nerdy hooligan who dresses like a paramilitary incel with a severe mullet. But it’s the kind of side quest for Chalamet where just wants to have some good fun in a stacked ensemble cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep and Ariana Grande. Yule certainly occupies a sweet spot amongst his work, like your weird but endearing cousin.
9. Tom, Interstellar (2014)
When Christopher Nolan casts a young actor in his films, their ranking in any one to watch listicle tends to skyrocket. That was the case for a then 17-year-old Chalamet who got his first major movie credit playing Matthew McConaughey’s stubborn son, Tom, in Interstellar. As part of the “caretaker” generation depicted in the film, Chalamet portrays a resentful teen who is pivoted towards a career in farming instead of pursuing higher education; he feels betrayed by the state as well as his father, who goes off into space in a last bid to save the planet. It’s a small role, one that Casey Affleck would take over as an older Tom, but Chalamet is pivotal to the film’s most heart-wrenching scene as he assumes the burden of taking care of his family in an inhospitable world.
8. Nic Sheff, Beautiful Boy (2018)
This one’s a tear-jerker. Based on two memoirs, Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction and Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff, it’s a rare instance of two pieces of source material collating into one work, beautifully rendered by Chalamet as Nic and the usually comedic Steve Carrell as his father. At the time of its release in 2018, and riding on the laurels of Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name, it’s another film that only boosted Chalamet’s profile even more, not that he needed it.
7. Kyle, Lady Bird (2017)
It’s late in the year of 2017, and Chalamet has two titles coming out back to back: Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. There was already immense buzz for this rising talent from the former movie, mostly from the international art house crowd. But Chalamet’s supporting role as Kyle, Lady Bird’s suburban bad-boy love interest, exposed him to yet another audience: teenage girls. It was the perfect formula for a new kind of movie star, one who acting ability can have mass appeal.
6. Lee, Bones and All (2022)
As far as depictions of cannibalism and gore goes in cinema, Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All is curiously bloodless. The Italian filmmaker taps Chalamet for the road movie – their second film together – starring opposite a then relatively unknown Taylor Russell as young “eaters” in love. If anything, the movie is a trigger-happy joyride through the American Midwest, where Chalamet brings a brooding charisma to his character Lee, similar to that of Martin Sheen in Terrence Malick’s 1973 Badlands. The long American highways can be monotonous, but trust the director-actor duo to make it freaky.
5. Paul ‘Muad’Dib’ Atreides, Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024)
In less than a decade, Chalamet has carved a name for himself geared towards the indie tastes of the industry, very rarely appearing in a a handful of blockbusters (and only then in smaller roles). But his casting as Paul Atreides in Denis Villeneuves’ Dune trilogy was perhaps a culmination of both art house and mass appeal (the latter being what a lot of his contemporaries are afraid to venture into). With two films of the franchise down, Chalamet’s Atreides has gone from timid princeling to an all-out messiah.
Taking on the role was not an easy task, considering how territorial fans of a beloved book franchise can be, but Chalamet sticks the landing. It also helps if the first adaption was a complete flop; not much to scale in the ruins of David Lynch’s 1984 Dune – when too true of an adaptation can ultimately be self-destructive.
4. Laurie, Little Women (2019)
The cast of Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women was in a league of its own. Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson, Timothée Chalamet. These would become some of the biggest names of 21st century cinema. The film follows the March family living in post-Civil War era Massachusetts, focusing on the dynamics between the four young sisters Jo (Ronan), Amy (Pugh), Meg (Emma Watson), and Beth (Eliza Scanlen).
The living conditions and aspirations of the sisters become even more tangled when Jo and Amy form a close friendship with their wealthier neighbour Laurie, played by Chalamet. There’s a swagger but earnest tenderness and charm to Chalamet’s performance, heightened in contrast to the strong wills of Ronan and Pugh’s Jo and Amy, respectively, who both received Oscar nominations for the film.
3. Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown (2024)
There’s a moment in A Complete Unknown where Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan becomes fully formed. Chalamet’s stratospheric ascent in the film industry at such a young age mirrors that of Dylan’s. The films asks: what does fame do to young stars? James Mangold’s portrait of the enigmatic musician covers the four years (from 1961 to 1965) that immortalised Dylan. In this dramatisation, Dylan arrives in New York City bushy-eyed and meeting his folk genre heroes. Halfway through, as he puts on shades, his iconic leather jacket and distinctive hunch, it becomes clearer that the shield Dylan adopted was to safeguard his identity in ’60s fan worship culture.
One of the major selling points of the film was Chalamet’s vocals, which he delivers with impressive accuracy. Chalamet’s lithe build and vulnerability give him his timeless and diverse appeal for any genre, and, indeed, character.
2. Elio Perlman, Call Me By Your Name (2017)
To take a version of “do you remember your first Leo movie?” and apply it to Chalamet, the likely answer would be Call Me By Your Name. Released in 2017, it was not only the movie that introduced the then 21-year old actor to most of us, but also to the indie and art-house scene, where he would soon become a prominent fixture in the works of other auteurs like Wes Anderson and Greta Gerwig.
Also the first outing between Chalamet and Guadagnino, the film follows Elio Perlman, a young Jewish-American spending fruitful summers in 1980s northern Italy with his trilingual (in English, French and Italian) intelligentsia family. It’s an idyllic slice of Americans abroad, captured by Guadagnino in a way only a continental eye could: not the honking tourists in Positano.
But Elio’s routine is disrupted when his father (Michael Stuhlbarg) hires a teaching assistant for the summer, the adonis Oliver (Armie Hammer), who he quickly becomes infatuated with. It’s a story of first loves and, albeit, sanitised lust and desire, that earned Chalamet his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
1. Marty Mauser, Marty Supreme (2025)
Chalamet is the tightly wound screw that holds Josh Safdie’s dizzying table tennis epic, Marty Supreme, together – and it’s his best role yet. He plays Marty Mauser, a lithe little man with an almost cartoonish level of confidence and the bravado of Michael Jordan, but the appearance of a run-of-the-mill suburban teenager. He doesn’t look like a world-beating athlete, but then again, his sport is table tennis – which he is hell bent on turning into a global phenomenon. The film’s runtime is populated with anxiety inducing scenarios in which things go from bad to worse for Mauser. At one stage he falls through the ceiling in a bathtub, at another his naked buttocks are spanked with a ping pong paddle (a scene in which he reportedly refused to use a stunt double) in a last ditch effort to secure a spot at a lucrative table tennis exhibition in Japan. Few actors could play such a role as convincingly as Chalamet. It remains to be seen whether he’ll be rewarded for it with his first Oscar.
Is Timothée Chalamet French?
As the accent aigu over the first ‘E’ in his name suggests, Chalamet is French. He counts it from his father’s side, but he also has Russian and Austrian-Jewish heritage from his mother. Chalamet is bilingual in English and French, making his casting as the confidently spoken trilingual in Call Me By Your Name (he learned Italian for the role) all the more fitting.
Related:
An evolving list of Timothée Chalamet’s best looks from the set of Marty Supreme
