Weight & career

Chalamet in the Hollywood craze: gaining weight for fame?

Timothée Chalamet(Bild: APA/AFP/ANTHONY WALLACE)

There seems to be something wrong with almost everyone in the Hollywood beauty craze. While many have to go on extreme diets and hardcore workouts to fit into the film industry's fit mold, "Dune" star Timothée Chalamet has been told he needs to gain weight to get big movie roles.

The "Wonka" actor will be seen in the film biopic "A Complete Unknown" as folk legend Bob Dylan. He explained that he was able to empathize with the legendary musician because he felt like an "outsider" in his own career until he was able to go his own way.

"Not the right body"
On "The Zane Lowe Show" on Apple Music 1, he said, "I've had a life experience, I want to say it's weird, but I can identify with some of those things he went through. So Bob wanted to be a rock-n-roll star, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, that was, depending on how you look at it, the kind of pop rock-n-roll music that was marketed to kids in the late '50s."

That's what happened to Chalamet with acting. He said: "I wanted to be a great movie actor. But when I auditioned for 'Maze Runner' or 'Divergent', the kind of movies that were in vogue at the time, they always said, 'Oh, you're not the right actor: 'Oh, you don't have the right body'. I had an agent who called me and said, 'You need to put on weight: 'You need to put on weight', ultimately not aggressively, but you know. And then I found my way into these very personal movies or something, for him it was folk music."

The 28-year-old star found that working on "personal films" helped him find his "flow" in his work.