Timothée Chalamet Recalls Getting Rejected By Maze Runner, Divergent & More For The Same Reason

Timothée Chalamet missed out on some huge opportunities early in his career. The 28-year-old star had his breakout role in Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 Best Picture nominee Call Me By Your Name, an LGBTQ+ love story where he played a teenager falling for his father’s intern (Armie Hammer) over the course of a summer in 1980s Italy. Chalamet has now appeared in a total of five Best Picture nominees, a roster that also includes Lady Bird, Little Women, Don’t Look Up, and Dune.

Timothée Chalamet movies now run the gamut between smaller arthouse fare and major blockbusters. In addition to starring in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies, which are both critical and commercial smash hits, he played the title role in the prequel Wonka, which is the highest-grossing non-Disney original musical of all time. He has become such a superstar that a contest was held in New York to find his closest lookalike, going viral thanks to his surprise appearance and spawning many similar contests around the globe.

Timothée Chalamet Lost His Chance At Some Major Blockbusters For One Reason

He Was Submitted For Several Young Adult Tentpoles

Timothee Chalamet looking up in Lady Bird

Timothée Chalamet has now revealed the reason that he did not get several major roles for which he was submitted in the mid-2010s. During that time, he was bubbling under, with his most prominent role being a supporting performance in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. Other projects in which he appeared during that time included the dramedy Men, Women & Children (his feature debut), the television thriller Homeland, a single episode of Law & Order, the James Franco drama The Adderall Diaries, and the holiday comedy Love the Coopers.

Chalamet played the Vice President’s son Finn Walden in eight episodes of
Homeland
.

Rolling Stone UK recently sat down for an interview with Timothée Chalamet while he was promoting his upcoming Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. After falling in love with The Dark Knight, he went out for various young adult action roles in projects including The Maze Runner (likely the role that eventually went to Dylan O’Brien) and Divergent (presumably for one of the roles that went to Theo James and Miles Teller). However, he was told “you don’t have the right body.”

While he tried to put on weight, his “metabolism… couldn’t do it” and eventually one agent stopped submitting him for action projects altogether. Read his full quote below:

I would always get the same feedback. “Oh, you don’t have the right body.” I had an agent call me once and say, “I’m tired of getting the same feedback. We’re gonna stop submitting you for these bigger projects, because you’re not putting on weight.” I was trying to put on weight. I couldn’t! I basically couldn’t. My metabolism or whatever the f–k couldn’t do it.

Hollywood’s Body Culture Could Have Hampered One Of Its Biggest Stars

A Closeup of Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides in Dune Part Two

Timothée Chalamet‘s comments highlight the extreme restrictions of Hollywood culture and how it affects people with body sizes at either end of the spectrum. While movies like the young adult properties mentioned may not have made him a huge star, especially considering the fact that that the Divergent franchise in particular did not have enough viewership to allow it to bring the final movie to theaters, this consistent rejection may have resulted in Chalamet never becoming a major star if he hadn’t been launched into the stratosphere by indie and arthouse directors.

Source: Rolling Stone UK