Why Timothée Chalamet is The Best Male Actor of Our Decade

Timothée Chalamet is one of the best male actors that our decade has seen. His unique and credible acting style makes him stand out amongst the crowd. 

Chalamet, born Timothée Hal Chalamet, is a French-American actor who was born December 27th, 1995 in Manhattan, New York. He grew up in the Manhattan Plaza located in Hell’s Kitchen. Chalamet is fluent in both French and English and spent most of his childhood in New York, but spent his summers in Le Chambon -sur-Lignon a small french village a little outside of Lyon. Chalamet attended PS 87 William T. Sherman Elementary School and later the selective Delta Program at MS 54 Booker T Middle School both located in New York City. 

A turning point in his school experience happened when he got accepted into Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. “I had some excellent teachers and really fell in love with it,” says Chalamet. He starred in many musicals and performances like Cabaret and Sweet Charity while attending school. Chalamet graduated from LaGuardia High School for the arts in 2013. After high school, he attended Columbia University, to later transfer to New York University’s Gallatin School Individualized Study to pursue his acting career. 

Chalamet, having studied acting and performing arts in high school, in 2014 through 2016 he performed roles in movies like Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children, and Andrew droz Palermo’s One & Two. In 2017 Chalamet had his breakthrough. Chalamet starred in Luca Guadagino’s Call Me by Your Name, based on Andre’s Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name. The story revolves around 17 year old Elio Pearlman, a young teen living in Italy in the 1980s, who falls in love with Oliver, an exchange student who comes to stay at his house for the summer to study with his father. Call Me by Your Name premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. 

Olly Richards of Empire wrote “In a film in which every performance is terrific, Chalamet makes the rest look like they’re acting. He alone would make the film worth watching.” The New York Times featured him on their list of best actors of the year. Call Me by Your Name received 35 major nominations in 2018, winning 11 of them. While starring in Call Me by Your Name, Chalamet also starred alongside actress Saoirse Ronan in Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird. Critics praised the cast and the acting that went along with this project. Starring in these movies in 2017 really got Chalamet noticed and opened many doors in his acting career. 

After Chalamet’s big 2017 breakthrough, he started to star in many big films. In 2018 he starred in Felix van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy, in which Chalamet told the story of Nic Sheff, a teenager who lived with an addiction to methamphetamine. According to a post on Wikimedia, Owen Glieberman of Variety draws comparisons with Chalamet’s performance stating that “Nic, in his muffled millennial James Dean way, [as] skittery and self-involved” is a transformation from the “marvelous directness” he displayed in the role of Elio Perlman. 

The next year Chalamet played the marvelous role of Theodore “Laurie” Laurence in Great Gerwig’s adoption of Louis May Alcott’s novel Little Women. Now in 2021 Chalamet is known all around the world for his acting, and is still starring in many amazing films. Just last weekend, October 22,  was the release of two of Chalamet’s projects, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. 

Dune is Chalamet’s first sci-fi blockbuster movie, but certainly won’t be his last. It remains as the number 1 watched movie in the world right now. 

Timothée Chalamet, I think is one of the best male actors of our decade. His acting range from Call Me by Your Name to Beautiful Boy even to Little Women is beyond belief. Several media publications consider Chalamet to be among the most talented actors of his generation. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times stated that his performance in Beautiful Boy “might make him male actor of his generation”. According to an interview in Time Magazine, one of Chalamet’s life mottos is “I feel like I’m here to show that to wear your heart on your sleeve is O.K.”