Timothée Chalamet Was the Most Careful Actor in Hollywood — What Happened?

The first time I saw Timothée Chalamet, I didn’t see him at all. He was the young version of Casey Affleck’s character in Interstellar, and I will be honest, I looked straight past him (sorry, Timothée).

Three years later, he turned up in two films in the genre I love most, the emotional indie picture, and I finally clocked what everyone was about to spend a decade clocking.

In Call Me By Your Name he was Elio, all exposed nerve endings, willing to cry and ache and humiliate himself the way most young heartthrobs are far too careful to risk. The same year, in Lady Bird, he was Kyle, the pretentious indie boy every teenage girl falls for and absolutely should not, and he played him knowing exactly what the joke was.

Raw and remote in the same 12 months. But the thing that really got me was the call sheet: Luca Guadagnino and Greta Gerwig in a single year. He was thinking about a career while everyone else his age was thinking about a moment.

Last week, Timothée Chalamet did something that genuinely rattled me, and I do not rattle easily after 30 years of this stuff. I try to be unemotional in my approach to my work, but I am genuinely a fan of Timothée and think he’s the most exciting new addition to the entertainment world in the last decade.

But he became the face of Kalshi.

The campaign, a surreal 60 seconds directed by the Oscar-winning cinematographer Linus Sandgren, has him muttering the brand name at his dentist and banging his head on the ceiling at his noisy neighbors. Very arty. The trouble is what Kalshi is: a platform that lets users gamble on more or less anything, from elections to who wins Best Actor, while skating past gambling regulation by calling itself financial trading.

It is heavily tied to the Trump family, and critics call it predatory, built to hoover young people into betting their wages away.

And then, days later, in San Antonio on the thirteenth of June, the final buzzer of Game 5, 53 years of New York Knicks heartbreak dissolving into confetti, and there in the scrum is a 30-year-old man having a spiritual experience. He hugged strangers. He bellowed at the rafters. “Way rather this than the Oscars,” he howls. “World champs, baby!”

Two images, one week, both of them a very different Timothée from the one who built a flawless playbook into acting royalty.

And he has the internet rattled. The fans were merciless: “Bro sold his soul.” “How do we go from Call Me By Your Name to this?” Media consultant Montaine Media even asked, “When did Timothée Chalamet turn evil?”, arguing he used to feel like an artist’s artist and is now unrecognizable.

So what happened to the young man who seemed to do everything right up until this year? And should fans be worried?

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