Frank Ocean interviewed Call Me By Your Name's Timothée Chalamet

Ocean chatted to this year’s breakout actor about his star-making turns in queer romance Call Me By Your Name and Greta Gerwig's feature Lady Bird

Article by Jamie Dunn | 06 Feb 2018

Timothée Chalamet is everywhere at the minute. The 22-year-old New Yorker has been the actor on everybody’s lips since his knockout performance in Call Me By Your Name, for which he's been Oscar nominated for Best Actor. During the various press junkets and press conferences that Chalamet has attended over the last 12 months since Call Me By Your Name premiered at Sundance, he’s made one thing abundantly clear: he loves Frank Ocean.

It seems the admiration is reciprocated. Last December, Ocean took to his Tumblr to proclaim that “Michael Stuhlbarg is my new dad now and that’s that,” referring to the actor who plays Chalamet’s father in Call Me By Your Name. Stuhlbarg gives an emotive speech near the film's close displaying his acceptance of his son’s sexuality and the romantic relationship he had with Armie Hammer’s graduate student over an idyllic Italian summer.

And now the two men have had a chin wag for a feature in V-Man and it's full of highlights. Ocean begins by asking Chalamet about the attention he's getting for his performance in Call Me By Your Name and Greta Gerwig's wonderful coming-of-age film Lady Bird, where he plays a pretentious rich-boy hipster.

“Has anyone on the street called you Elio yet?” asks Ocean, referring to Chalamet’s Call Me By Your Name character. Surprisingly, it’s for his smaller role in Lady Bird that he gets most comments. “I actually get more people stopping me for Lady Bird, and going, 'Is that the douchebag from Lady Bird?' So that’s awesome. I’ve seen certain actors, or musicians like you, keep a sense of integrity and mystery. That’s ultimately what’s been really awesome about Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird as an introduction [to me]: I was up for bigger, more commercial projects, but I didn’t get them. They just didn’t choose me, and it’s been gratifying, coming from more of a place of artistry and not just pure exposure.”

Later, Ocean brings up Chalamet's infamous LaGuardia rap videos as his alter-ego Timmy T, who likes to rap about statistics. “Oh, fuck. [Laughs.] I can’t believe you saw the statistics video. That’s embarrassing,” says the actor. “I saw it on Ellen,” says Ocean. “I figured if Ellen’s talking about it, then it’s fair game.”

Ocean also asked Chalamet about his acting ambitions, and if he'd like to move into blockbuster territory off the back of his current indie success. “How do you feel about making movies that aren’t as full to the brim with emotion and real feeling as the last two movies you made?” asks Ocean. “Like, how do you feel about making Transformers?”

Chalamet, who had a small role in Interstellar, is certainly down for bigger movies: “As Kanye put it, Guillermo del Toro made Pacific Rim and that’s one of his favorite movies. His latest movie, The Shape of Water, is amazing. Christopher Nolan is tied with Paul Thomas Anderson [as] my favorite director. If one of those auteurs has a $200 million film and wants me to be a part of it, fuck yeah.”

Read the full interview over at V-Man.