Timothée Chalamet in Celine. Urban Jürgensen watch. Image of Emission Nebula, O 6.5 Star is courtesy of NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Telescope Heritage Team. Fashion Editor: Eric McNeal.Photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Vogue, December 2025.
Down the hall and unbeknownst to the group of grade school girls practicing their tendus in mismatched leotards.
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Timothée Chalamet has spent an hour walking in circles. He has experimented with footfalls. Tweaked the swing of his gait. Paused, reset, touched the tips of his long fingers together. Drilled this circular walk once, twice, a dozen times—until it looks effortless and unstudied. We’re at a dance studio in Hell’s Kitchen, the same neighborhood in which 29-year-old Chalamet grew up, and he is rehearsing for a performance that has bedeviled peers and predecessors, that can drive an actor to madness, or at least to an unforced error on late-night television: the role of leading man who must now promote his latest project.
Chalamet has devised a concept—and to be clear this is his concept—that might best be described as an acid trip of a cadet march. Welcome to the press tour for Marty Supreme: Chalamet in the center of a group of men dressed in black, each wearing a cadmium-orange-colored Ping-Pong ball the size of a classroom globe on his head.
Get used to seeing this band of pumpkin-headed foot soldiers, because Chalamet is taking them—and an album-release-like approach to Marty Supreme—on the road. The night before, he had debuted them on Instagram Live for an audience of 45,000 people to plug the movie’s Christmas Day release date. The night after we meet, he will show up to a Times Square theater with the same entourage to host a sneak peek for a first-come-first-served crowd.
To be fair, Marty Supreme is a movie that calls for an unusual rollout. It is, only in the most technical sense, a Ping-Pong movie. Far truer to call it a sweeping tale of ambition, fate, self-invention, gambling, love, and desire set in the 1950s—that just so happens to be oriented around the game of table tennis. Chalamet, a producer on the movie as well as its star, and director Josh Safdie (who last codirected the stress dream that was Uncut Gems with his brother, Benny) have been plotting it since 2018.
The movie’s hero—a loose interpretation of the former Ping-Pong champion Martin Reisman—is a shameless, entitled, arrogant, selfish, and juvenile Wheaties box aspirant. He makes a series of unbelievably poor decisions, a horror show of bad bets and outrageous outbursts that—credit to Chalamet and Safdie—are also somehow hilarious and inventive and profound. Marty Mauser is the most self-referential character Chalamet has ever played, which he understands is not entirely a compliment. “It’s the most me I was until I had any sort of career,” he says.
Safdie met Chalamet in 2017, “before he took off from planet earth,” he writes in an email, and knew he had found his Marty. “He had a lightness of being which allowed him to improvise any which way. In his voracious dreaming…in his fight to belong…I saw a man possessed and blinded by his ambition, just like Marty Mauser.”
Watching a rough cut of the movie alone in August, I laughed and cringed as Marty fumbled and failed. He is a fame monster. It is impossible not to fall a little bit in love with him.
A few nights before our encounter at the dance studio, Chalamet and Safdie had pulled together an unannounced screening of Marty Supreme for a rapt audience at the New York Film Festival. The surprise event was a homecoming for them both—two New Yorkers celebrating a movie in large part about their home city. The review embargo held, but the response was rhapsodic, and the awards chatter immediate and almost giddy, spurring one trade publication to list the records that Chalamet could break if he wins Oscars as both an actor and a producer.
“It couldn’t have gone better,” Chalamet says. He hates when actors undersell their own work or pretend it doesn’t matter what audiences think. He wants people to see his movies. What is the point of feigning indifference?
For a long time, he says he looked up to actors who “keep things tight-lipped.” Dark suits, dark sunglasses, all enigma. But then he started wondering whether the time had come to be a little more forthcoming. The film business is splintering, and people who want to sell movie tickets should perhaps learn from those who have succeeded in holding the public’s attention. That means going everywhere.
Last year, when he was promoting the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Chalamet sat down with manosphere podcast hosts and met YouTube stars. He attended his own look-alike contest. He has no interest in making prestige films for a vanishing population. He tracked the box office performance of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another—which he saw and loved. It is nothing to him to put an enormous Ping-Pong ball on his head if it makes even a fraction of his 19 million followers likelier to see Marty Supreme.
“You don’t want to risk being too declarative,” he says. “But I also don’t want to look back on life and things I’ve put out and go, ‘Oh, little old me. Hey, see the movie if you want. It is what it is.’ No. At worst, you’ve rubbed people the wrong way. And at best, someone will get pulled in and go, ‘Hey, this guy really thinks this thing’s worthy.’ ”
Now comes the part where I relay Chalamet’s childhood—a convention the restless, born-precocious Chalamet would, I’m sure, prefer we skate over or embellish. Let’s just run through it fast.
Chalamet grew up in subsidized artist housing in Manhattan with his older sister, Pauline, who is also an actor. Their father worked for UNICEF. Their mother is now a real estate agent, but she used to teach dance and French—the subject in which she earned her undergraduate degree from Yale. Chalamet applied to Yale and Harvard and was turned down by both, but he was a strong enough student at the famed LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts to get into Columbia University.
It was not a good fit. One anthropology course in particular sticks out. Chalamet had enrolled with a “brilliant” acquaintance, whom he’d met through the national arts program YoungArts. Chalamet floundered in discussions, but this new friend raised his hand to make incisive comments that impressed their peers. Now Chalamet doesn’t even remember the guy’s last name. Just the sting of realizing he was out of his depth.
During our interviews, Chalamet demonstrates a level of confidence so unshakable I could build a small dwelling on it. He does not experience what he calls a “fever pitch of self-terror” that he has seen in other people. He has watched actors buckle under pressure or lose themselves. “That’s never been who I am,” he says. “My superpower is my fearlessness. That’s the feedback I’ve gotten since I was a kid.”
Except thank God, here it is: a humanizing hint of insecurity. Chalamet describes the entire ordeal at Columbia as “rough.” He still believes he should never have been admitted and chalks his acceptance up to a bureaucratic quirk—the dull inverse of the divine hand of fate that seems to have intervened in the rest of his life and career. He is convinced that Columbia has a “quota of New Yorkers” that it must allow in for each undergraduate class, which four seconds of research tells me is not true. “Well, that’s my theory,” he says, “because I did feel for the first time ever, like, Oh, my tools aren’t as sharp as everyone else’s.”
When Chalamet was a kid, he wanted to grow up to be a professional athlete. It was a rude awakening to find that he just “didn’t have the gifts,” he says. He is not totally joking when he tells me he resents the message that he and other relatively cosseted millennial children received—that with hard work, we could do whatever we set our minds to. Chalamet, with his delicate, rangy frame, was never going to be a muscled phenomenon. Nor an Ivy League graduate. At parties, he likes to tell people that being “the dumbest person at Columbia” made him “one of the brightest people in LA.”
Chalamet decided soon after arriving at Columbia that he had to leave. He had been auditioning for acting jobs since he was a child, landing a pivotal role on the series Homeland and a small part in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar—which is still, of all the movies he’s been in, his favorite. In search of a more flexible class schedule, he transferred to the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and auditioned constantly. Mostly, he booked absolutely nothing.
“I remember thinking, Wow, if I ever do take off, and I’m this fragile around this stuff, how could I possibly deal with what the people I admire [deal with]?” he says. He is still jealous of musicians who can make something in their bedrooms or rent a studio with friends, post a snippet of their work, and connect with fans—sidestepping the middlemen. Acting is a business of checkpoints and gatekeepers. “You have to be willing to be a victim to rejection,” he says.
Eventually, obviously, it worked. So well, in fact, that Chalamet has not been back on television since Homeland. No appointment HBO programming. No slick FX series. When I ask if he thinks he’ll ever return to it, Chalamet responds with a simple, self-assured “no.” He doesn’t hedge with an out for “the right project” or offer some caveat about a certain director. He just flashes a movie-star smile, and that is the end of our on-the-record conversation about that.
He does consume TV, though. Chalamet devoured Lena Dunham’s recent Netflix show Too Much—infuriating Pauline, who has been nagging him to finally watch Girls. “She’s been all over me,” Chalamet says. “She’s like, ‘You can’t love Too Much without having seen Girls. Just watch the pilot!’ ”
Chalamet never actually auditioned for his breakout role in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, which was released in 2017 (as it happens, a few months after the series finale of Girls). Just before the film’s premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, Chalamet met the designer Haider Ackermann, who was wearing, at the time, a pink Berluti trench coat. Chalamet—who is dressed for our meeting in tricked-out Nike SFB boots and Marty Supreme merch that he has spent the past six months working on with the designer Doni Nahmias and his stylist Taylor McNeill—took one look at “this big raincoat, and I was like, ‘Oh, boom. That’s what I’m wearing.’ ” His publicist was appalled. This was supposed to be a pivotal moment in Chalamet’s nascent career, and he wanted to wear an Elle Woods slicker. “It was like, ‘You’re not even going to get off the ground!’ ” he remembers being told. “ ‘You’re going to ruin what you’re doing before you get going.’ ”
Of course he did wear the Berluti jacket. And he and Ackermann are still friends. Being an actor requires “a degree of obedience” that Chalamet chafes at. “I think some people relish it, not even just actors. I’m talking publicists, the unit people. People love to be told what to do.” That eagerness to submit is part of what Dune—Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic in which Chalamet plays the could-be-messiah Paul Atreides—is about. It explains much of geopolitics too. Chalamet does not want to overstate his penchant for self-liberation, but he likes his freedom.
“I had to put the pink jacket on,” he says. Fashion has been one of his preferred modes of self-expression ever since, and he has upended what is acceptable for men to wear on the red carpet. Chalamet has fastened necklaces in lieu of ties and worn wristfuls of bracelets and watches where others would limit themselves to cuff links. To the premiere of Guadagnino’s 2022 film Bones and All, he wore a backless red halter top. Back at the Berlinale in 2025 for A Complete Unknown, he chose a pale pink Chrome Hearts hoodie.
Chalamet has a different publicist now, and Call Me by Your Name turned him into a sensation. “The experience of getting famous the way I did and the rocket ship of it was destabilizing,” he says. “I feel like I made it to the other side of not some tragic, fucked-up chemical thing, but just the challenges and a lot of the mental health stuff that comes with being a talented artist.” (He is on a break from therapy, he says, with the full blessing of his “very generous therapist,” who told him, “ ‘Hey, when you’re flying, you got to fly. That’s the whole point.’ ”)
“I’m so fucking locked in now,” Chalamet says. “I’m literally actively falling in love with this newfound creative structure, this discipline that I’ve only accrued through experience.”
Which is a very Chalamet-esque way of saying that he has spent the past year experimenting with what it is he can do. He has always prepared assiduously for roles, hiring dialect, guitar, harmonica, vocal, and movement coaches to play Dylan in A Complete Unknown and traveling with a Ping-Pong table to practice his game for Marty Supreme. But lately he has been interested in pushing other kinds of boundaries.
When he hosted SNL earlier this year, he also appeared as the show’s musical guest and performed his versions of Dylan’s songs live. “I called Finneas, Billie Eilish’s brother, and said, ‘Who did the set for you guys on SNL?’ ” Chalamet says. He personally hired that team, plus the best musicians he could find to back him up.
He is self-funding the design and production of the gargantuan Ping-Pong heads and the Marty Supreme track jackets as well, although he expects studio A24 will come in for some of it.
“I feel thrilled by it all,” he says. Where else would he rather spend his money than on making his work better? “I found I have a point of view and authorship that’s unusual,” he says. “I hope it doesn’t rub people the wrong way.”
A few weeks after his turn on SNL, Chalamet won best actor at the Screen Actors Guild Awards for A Complete Unknown. From the podium he delivered the kind of speech that gets an immediate add to YouTube compilations. It made such waves that Josh O’Connor—a star in the sensitive, brooding Chalamet mold—cited it with admiration in a GQ profile more than six months later. Chalamet insisted he was “in pursuit of greatness.” He name-checked Viola Davis, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Marlon Brando—a list he says he had not prepared in advance. Sure, it was an honor to be nominated. But it was better to win.
So of course he was disappointed when he lost out at the Oscars a week later. “If there’s five people at an awards show, and four people go home losing,” Chalamet says, “you don’t think those four people are at the restaurant like, ‘Damn, we didn’t win’? I’ve been around some deeply generous, no-ego actors, and maybe some of them are going, ‘That was fun.’ But I know for a fact a lot of them are going, ‘Fuck!’ ”
At least Chalamet is honest about it. “People can call me a try-hard, and they can say whatever the fuck,” he continues. “But I’m the one actually doing it here.”
Chalamet shot Marty Supreme—which he calls “a movie about being an idiot and making bad decisions, but also honoring your ambition and recognizing your talent in the mirror and being singularly focused”—in the months leading up to the release of A Complete Unknown. It was filmed mostly in New York: a sprawling production with close to 150 speaking parts that has reportedly made it A24’s most expensive to date.
Chalamet trained for this one relentlessly, memorizing elaborate sequences of Ping-Pong choreography and obsessively rewatching The Last Dance, the docuseries about another wildly talented and aggressively sure-footed athlete. “Timmy and I often discussed the dance-like quality of the matches,” Safdie writes. “I saw Marty as a Baryshnikov or a Balanchine. Some of the points held a 14-trade rally and remembering the combinations was very difficult…it demanded a hyper amount of focus and I took great joy in knowing that Timmy would be prepared. In a way, it seemed like the easy part for him.”
Harder was contending with the paparazzi, who were soon snapping Chalamet and costar Gwyneth Paltrow locked in a passionate embrace in Central Park. The internet lit up, as did Paltrow’s own group texts. “It was so ridiculous,” says Paltrow. “I was like, ‘You guys, calm down.’ ” But they couldn’t. Chalamet just has that effect on people. He reduces mom chats to pre-language exclamations.
In Marty Supreme, which also stars Tyler, the Creator, Fran Drescher, Sandra Bernhard, Kevin O’Leary, Odessa A’zion, and Penn Jillette, Paltrow plays a stifled former actress contemplating her comeback. Her character is married, but she embarks on an affair with Marty, who takes a wrecking ball to her fragile equilibrium. The role marks Paltrow’s most substantial return to the big screen in well over a decade, and Chalamet made it nice. “I love that he’s such a free and independent thinker,” she says. “You know how a lot of us in conversation are like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’? He’s sort of like, ‘No….’ He’s always running things through the filter of, ‘How do I actually feel about this?’ ”
Chalamet was no less in awe of Paltrow. “Here’s someone whose sense of self-worth and whose sense of how their time is being respected or not has nothing to do with the film industry,” he says. “She seemed healthy in that regard—and really chic.”
He admires her cool detachment. He can’t relate.
Chalamet flew from France to Las Vegas for Vogue’s cover shoot with Annie Leibovitz. The process was exhausting and exhilarating—three days in the Nevada desert at the massive land-art installation City by Michael Heizer. “It’s just a totally remote experience,” Chalamet says. (The site is open three days a week and allows only six visitors per day, but Heizer’s work will be more accessible to New York audiences come February, when Gagosian mounts an exhibition of his new work.) “Annie is an absolute beast,” Chalamet says while he paces around a hotel room on FaceTime with me. “Sometimes when people become so ubiquitous or iconic, you can lose sight of how much effort goes in. She’s the first one up at 5:30 a.m. You’re coming downstairs, and she’s poring over materials.”
His conversations with Leibovitz about portrait setups and character arcs reminded Chalamet of collaborations with film directors. “She almost had a crazy compulsive creative attitude,” he says. “She wasn’t concerned with anything but getting great stuff, and then I’m sure she went on to the next thing.”
Chalamet used to romanticize the tortured artistic process. But now he is much more drawn to effort and readiness. Less poet, more athlete, musician, stand-up, pulpit rabbi. “Especially something I’m shooting right now on Dune—it’s so massive,” he says of Villeneuve’s third installment, now in production on elaborate sets in Budapest and in Abu Dhabi. “It’s almost like a moving city. To be able to do it on go? That’s the goods.”
It also frees him to have more fun. Javier Bardem—who plays the spiritual adviser Stilgar—remembers Chalamet and Zendaya battling at base camp when the cameras were down between takes, “rapping and doing hip-hop music and singing.”
“I find it really valuable when actors and actresses can be very focused and at the same time able to relax between setups,” Bardem says. “And that’s what I felt with him.”
“I’m an old man,” he adds, with a smile, “but it was fun to see them do it.”
The animating question of Marty Supreme is whether a person has to be selfish to be great. Before I fully pose it to him, Chalamet starts answering it. “I had a friend of mine in school—a girl named Grace—and her parents had the most beautiful, amazing marriage.” He pauses, sheepish. “This is not in context of being great, so this is a little tangential, but it showed me excellence can exist without it being arduous.” We had been discussing drive and the quest for eminence. He wanted to talk about the nirvana of a fulfilling relationship.
He presses on: “You don’t have to be selfish to be great, no. And I know, because I’ve worked with directors who are incredible and who are incredibly present in their family life. Even Denis, who I’m working with right now. I’m just amazed by him. It was his birthday two days ago, and one of his kids flew themselves out as a surprise, and he’s hugging him, and he’s weeping on set, and people are taking videos. Denis is a total master of his craft, and he’s a great family man.”
Chalamet will not talk about his relationship with girlfriend Kylie Jenner (“and I don’t say that with any fear, I just don’t have anything to say”), but he doesn’t mind at all acknowledging the new stage of his life that he is entering into. His sister just had a baby. “Zendaya is engaged. Anya is married,” he says of two of his Dune costars.
No spoilers, but the specter of fatherhood hangs over Marty Supreme too. It’s something Chalamet would like to experience. He remembers sitting with a friend, watching an interview with someone whose name he is “definitely” not going to share. The person in question was “bragging about not having kids and how much time it afforded them to do other stuff,” he says. Chalamet and his friend turned to each other: “Like, holy shit. Oh my God. Bleak.” He knows some people can’t have children or are never in a position to. But he does believe procreation is the reason we’re here.
Yes, children: “That could be on the radar,” he says.
More than once in our conversations, Chalamet comes back to a point he is making and reframes it, testing out new metaphors, tossing out words that will better describe his intent or mood. He touches on COVID-era protocols, intimacy coordinators, having a social conscience, the integration of self, and the nature of genius (no pitchforks! Not his own).
At one point, while dissecting his particular brand of ambition, he second-guesses: “Do I even want to say this?” he wonders. “Maybe not.” But then he goes on. Because who cares? So he regrets it—some piece of this or even our whole conversation. It won’t matter. He will get older and he will not be looking back, “hopefully, God forbid,” at press he did when he was 29. What a relief.
After Dune, Chalamet has “a clean slate.” He and the director James Mangold will reunite at some point on a recently announced film titled High Side. Otherwise, he wants to keep his options—and his mind—open. He has been taking himself to plays: Punch in New York and even more unconventional productions in Los Angeles. “I feel like theater in LA is kind of radical,” he says. “I was at a show with, like, 61 people in the crowd, and it was pretty out-there. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, Wow, I can’t believe this is in West Hollywood.”
I had asked earlier if—given his reverence for filmmakers—he ever planned to direct a feature, and he had held me off. But he comes back to the idea as our conversation is winding down.
“If I ever did, it’s not going to be some vanity thing,” he says. “It’s not going to be like, I wanted to do this thing, and people say, ‘Okay, you can, because you’re famous enough to do this thing, but you’re not actually good at it.’ ” If Chalamet can’t do it at “the highest level,” it isn’t worth doing at all. Which is not to say it would necessarily be a success.
Years ago, he came across an interview with one of his idols, Daniel Day-Lewis. “He said, ‘You risk being foolish,’ ” Chalamet remembers. “You risk being foolish, and that’s really the only risk.” With those stakes and his talent? “It’s like, Why not go super hard?”
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In this story: grooming, Pircilla Pae; tailor, Megan Bright from Tailor Here.
Produced by AL Studio. Set Design: Mary Howard.
City, 1970–2022 © Michael Heizer. Courtesy of Triple Aught Foundation. Visits to City can be reserved at tripleaughtfoundation.org.
