Until today, Timothée Chalamet—noted fashion guy—had surprisingly never starred in a major brand campaign. That all changed this morning, when Chanel announced the red-hot actor as the newest face of Bleu de Chanel, the French luxury house’s top-selling men’s fragrance.
Rumors about Chalamet’s potential Chanel ambassadorship cropped up online a few weeks ago, when paparazzi and onlookers alike snapped the actor filming a Martin Scorsese-directed ad spot for the fragrance in New York City late last month. (Scorsese previously directed another Bleu de Chanel commercial starring its former longtime ambassador, the late French actor-model Gaspard Ulliel, in 2010.) Though the commercial—which so far seems to feature Chalamet galavanting around NoHo and on a rainy subway platform in Astoria—won’t be out until the fall, an accompanying campaign shot by Mario Sorrenti will likely appear on billboards around the city beginning in June.
Speaking of New York City: Chalamet, who grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, shared some choice native-Manhattanite soundbites in a Vogue interview tied to the announcement. Perhaps the juiciest insight? That a teenaged Timmy did most of his shopping at the now-shuttered Topshop flagship store on Broadway in SoHo. “Honestly it was the women’s clothes at Topshop for me,” he said. “That’s the stuff that just fit growing up.”
The actor also, per an accompanying video, still maintains his city-bred appetite: “Bagels are about 95% of this diet right here,” he said. “They keep me alive.” Then he added, laughing: “You’re not gonna use that in a Chanel ad.”
In the same interview, the actor dished on two of his most-discussed upcoming projects: the Roald Dahl adaptation Wonka, which hits theaters in December, and James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, which begins filming in New York this summer. (Both films are musicals, and Chalamet will be doing his own singing in each.) On the Wonka front, Chalamet said he felt compelled “to work on something that will have an uncynical young audience.”
“In a time and climate of intense political rhetoric,” he said, “when there’s so much bad news all the time, this is hopefully going to be a piece of chocolate.”
But the Dylan flick, now years in the making, has been a bit more complicated. “I’ve been preparing for forever,” the actor told Vogue with a sigh. The process has included daily sessions with a voice coach, which brought him back to his days at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, the performing arts institution made famous in Fame.
“I can’t expect anyone outside of the New York City public school system to know this, but there is a production of Cabaret at LaGuardia, class of 2013, that you can watch on YouTube,” he said. “I remember the New York Times critic Ben Brantley saying very nice things about it, so I’m going to emphasize that.”
