Watching Hubris Take Hold: A Fan’s POV on Timothée Chalamet’s Rebrand
*Editor's Note: This essay was updated to include additional context from recent tweets and public reactions, as audience sentiment around Timothée Chalamet continues to evolve in real time. A thesis explored in this piece considers the possibility of Chalamet pivoting toward rap music or adjacent creator-driven spaces; this analysis was formed independently and prior to the EsDeeKid collaboration on December 19, 2025. The timing is unrelated, though the overlap is notable.
I have been watching Timothée Chalamet unravel for over a year. Not gleefully. Not cynically. Certainly not as someone predisposed to dislike him, but as someone who once believed (earnestly, almost embarrassingly) that he would become one of the greats.
Call Me By Your Name was my introduction to his work. And from then until the press cycle for A Complete Unknown, I was a true believer: not in a vague celebrity way, but in the distinctly fandom-specific sense of being emotionally invested in an arc, a mythos, a persona tethered to craft.
Then something shifted. And I felt, in my bones, he was not going to come back from it unchanged.
No one else saw it then, back in 2024. Or maybe they didn’t want to see it. The world was still praising him, still adoring him, still elevating him as the soft-spoken prodigy of his generation. Tech Twitter (for whatever reason) practically crowned him king after his SAG speech about wanting to be “one of the greats.” They found it inspirational.
I found it grotesque. A flashing red signal of what was about to metastasize.
The line between ambition and arrogance was thinning. And now the irony is almost literary: Timothée Chalamet is not promoting a cautionary tale. He is living one.
Marty Supreme warns us what happens when ambition eclipses reality, when hunger becomes its own rationale, when aspiration detaches from consequence. Tragically, Timothée seems to believe the warning does not apply to him.
More than that: he has begun to market Marty Supreme as an exhortation for young people to “dream big,” flattening the film’s central admonition into motivational poster logic and completely abandoning its cautionary architecture at the precise moment he appears to be reenacting it in public. The result is overtly meta.
The beginning of the end: A Complete Unknown’s 2024 press tour
The shift began slowly with last year’s press tour for the sleepy Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. A different cadence in interviews. A slightly performative swagger. The creeping sense that he was no longer speaking to his core audience; the fandom infrastructure that had sustained him through a decade of goodwill.
Then, all at once, came the unmistakable pivot. A frat-coded, bro-pandering, meme-chasing public persona that made him feel less like an actor and more like someone testing out character work for the world’s most confusing Twitch debut.
Suddenly, he wasn’t speaking like an artist, he was speaking like a hypebeast. He wasn’t targeting cinephiles, he was targeting tech bros (albeit likely unintentional). Most importantly, he wasn’t promoting a film, he was promoting himself.
And virality followed, just not in the way a prestige actor needs.
Virality does not guarantee conversion
And this is where A Complete Unknown becomes the perfect case study for the problem. Music biopics are historically one of Hollywood’s most reliably profitable genres.
Bohemian Rhapsody: over $900 million worldwide and one of the highest-grossing biopics of all time. Elvis: a major summer hit, leggy box office, massive global audience. Straight Outta Compton: over $200 million worldwide, huge critical and commercial success. Rocketman, Walk the Line, Bob Marley: One Love.
All strong films that reaffirm the same pattern: music biopics sell. Massively. Consistently. There is a proven, decades-long audience appetite for artist stories, especially those of American icons. By every imaginable metric, A Complete Unknown, especially with a lead like Timothée, should have ridden that wave.
But it didn’t. It struggled.
The film ultimately broke even. Its final worldwide box office was around $140.5 million on a $70 million budget, technically profitable depending on how you calculate marketing costs and revenue splits. But this is the bare-minimum definition of “profitable.”
The truth is more uncomfortable. For a music biopic released during a season where ticket sales are typically high, this showing was soft. Surprising. Underwhelming. Out of alignment with the genre’s (and Timothée’s) track record.
A Complete Unknown moved sluggishly through its box office window, buoyed mostly by late-in-cycle momentum rather than explosive early adoption. So the question is unavoidable: why did Timothée’s film lag behind a genre known for minting blockbusters?
The answer, similarly unavoidable: because the virality he cultivated during the press tour for the film had little, if not nothing, to do with the movie.
His ESPN appearance, the Theo Von interview, the Lime bike and Beyblade red carpet “stunts” all promoted Timothée Chalamet, not the film. And the audience he courted during this first shift is not the audience that shows up for dramatic biopics about American folk musicians. In fandom terms, he didn’t convert attention into attachment, he converted it into spectatorship.
The Brazilian spiral of the Marty Supreme press tour
Nothing prepared me for Timothée Chalamet and Marty Supreme director Josh Safdie’s appearance in Brazil.
A fever dream of screaming into microphones, stripping clothes and tossing them into the audience, dancing to Soulja Boy, shouting self-referential nonsense, and brandishing the kind of alpha-male energy that makes even the most forgiving fans rub their temples.
It was a spectacle so chaotic it bordered on self-parody. A man possessed by the attention economy, performing not for acclaim but for response, or what we now call “clip-farming.”
And the recklessness of it all forces a darker question: what is it all for? Is his team truly this inept, or are we witnessing an intentional metamorphosis? A strategic, if chaotic, pivot designed to prime his audience for something entirely beyond A Complete Unknown, beyond Marty Supreme, and maybe even beyond acting itself?
Nothing about his current persona reads “serious actor with long-term prestige aspirations.” It reads rap star. Livestreaming icon. It reads like someone trying to cultivate a new demographic that reacts only to noise, chaos, swagger, and performance-of-self, not craft.
Surely he does not believe he can behave like this and continue a prosperous career in serious dramatic acting. Surely he understands that the persona he is inflating is incompatible with the industry he claims to want to thrive in.
Which leaves us with a disquieting possibility: either his team has lost control of the narrative… or this is the narrative.
A pivot so abrupt and so misaligned with his established audience that it feels almost deliberate, as if he is not just abandoning one version of himself but auditioning for a completely new one.
If Chalamet’s next chapter involves feature verses on remixes, a rap album, or a full migration into creator-driven performance spaces, it should not come as a shock. The groundwork is already being laid in public. The posture, the cadence, and the audience-testing are all happening in plain sight. At this point, the only surprise would be pretending it came out of nowhere.
The interview… yes, that one
The clip of one of Timothée’s most recent viral interviews circulated the internet like contraband. It’s one of those videos you come across and screen-record immediately because you know it won’t survive for long.
And sure enough, when you click through the original article where it was first published, the interview has been removed. It has been virtually sanitized from Twitter, or at least heavily buried. But I’ve already seen it and so has much of the internet.
In the interview, Timothée says with an eerie amount of earnestness:
“[Marty Supreme] is probably my best performance, and it's been like seven, eight years that I feel like I've been handing in really, really committed, top-of-the-line performances. And it's important to say out loud because the discipline and the work ethic I'm bringing to these things, I don't want people to take for granted. I don't want to take it for granted. This is really some top-level shit.”
Actors don’t grade their own work. They don’t declare themselves great. They don’t demand the world acknowledge their excellence. Greatness is earned quietly. Only insecurity insists on being named.
The internet did not take to it kindly. And the fact that the video has essentially vanished tells us everything we need to know.
It’s a frantic attempt to cauterize a wound, and the kind of move that happens only when every layer of the machine (team, studio, distributor, PR) realizes something has gone so catastrophically wrong that the safest option is erasure, even if it’s blatant. Interviews are currency during awards season. They are not pulled unless the risk outweighs the benefit, and this one vanished almost overnight.
He crossed a line.
The reaction was atomic.
The narrative was slipping away.
If you really want to understand how severe the damage is, you only have to look at who rushed to defend him and who didn’t.
The only people still cheering are finance bros, tech enthusiasts, slop-content hypebeasts, sports accounts, and people who consume culture as memes rather than sacred art. This is a demographic that doesn’t buy tickets, or care about prestige cinema, or participate in awards discourse, or sustain the careers of dramatic actors.
Meanwhile, the audiences that do sustain serious acting careers, the ones who show up for adult dramas, who follow directors, who care about performance and filmmaking; women, queer people, cinephiles – are recoiling. His entire foundation was built on their trust and that reservoir is now leaking.
Here is the core problem: Timothée Chalamet hasn’t simply lost his original audience; he has replaced them with people who cannot support the version of a career he claims to want. The persona he’s building belongs to a completely different industry. It is the posture of someone courting attention, not longevity.
That’s why the deletion of this interview is significant. It marks the moment his team realized that this ugly path Chalamet is on is good at getting views on the internet, but it is unsustainable and self-destructive.
In an attempt to prolong his acting career by embracing the internet’s hunger for spectacle, he is dismantling the version of himself that made that career possible. The work is becoming secondary to the performance of self, and the myth is overtaking the craft.
Awards bodies are saying the quiet part out loud
I sat at one of the earliest awards screenings of Marty Supreme hosted by the National Board of Review (NBR). It was packed. People were excited. The movie was sensational; sweaty, deranged, brilliant, kinetic.
Timothée was supposed to attend the Q&A (what everyone was really there for), but he bailed on his audience. The real kicker: he bailed on the Q&A to film an episode of Coulda Been Records with Druski.
A few weeks later, when NBR winners were announced, Marty Supreme (despite strong reviews, attendance, and admiration) won nothing. Not a single major recognition.
On the night Timothée foolishly bailed on NBR to film a YouTube video, I predicted it would lose out on crucial recognition because sometimes snubs are not about the film, but about the behavior around the film.
Awards bodies operate more like political coalitions than people want to admit, and nothing makes them close ranks faster than the scent of arrogance. These groups, the so-called Big Four critics associations (New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Society of Film Critics, and National Board of Review), set the entire tone of awards season. They are the first domino.
Marty Supreme’s total shutout was not just unsurprising; it was punitive. It was a message.
In the case of NBR, a room that had shown up in full force for the screening gave him nothing once he bailed on their Q&A to film what is sure to be another loud, performatively unhinged, and wildly obnoxious appearance. Since NBR’s snub? Silence. The major critics groups have bypassed him and he trails behind in fourth place with four awards from bodies based in Texas, Indiana, Illinois, and Arizona. What makes this especially sad is his performance is worthy, but the culture around him has become intolerable.
Directors and studios see this too. Acclaim requires likability, or at least respect. If the talent becomes a liability, they become nuclear. Executives don’t greenlight an Oscars campaign for an actor who makes enemies before the race has even begun, and without potential for prestige recognition, an A-lister’s demand depreciates.
Studios rely on at least some awards buzz to keep money flowing in. The more awards won, the more a studio can invest in future projects, maximizing the volume of revenue and awards prestige, which in turn will yield more funding and more films and more awards. If talent is a threat to this cycle, they are much less valuable to stakeholders than whoever is dubbed the Academy’s golden child that year.
Arthouse directors, prestige studios, hell, even general audiences, want to see golden children in films. Timothée is risking that status. In some ways, he might have already lost it.
The dangers of losing your core audience
The people who propelled Timothée Chalamet to stardom (women, queer audiences, cinephiles) are no longer the ones he’s performing for. As a result, they are, increasingly, the ones who are most passionate about participating in his takedown.
An actor who was once considered to be America’s sweet prince of Hollywood has quickly become the most polarizing star on God’s great internet, at least for this week.
His new audience is a hybrid of those most loyal fans who remain and still have faith, and a new crowd. Those who engage with art only when it fits inside of a punchline. Tech-adjacent spectators, who far too often mistake disruption for depth and idolize the hell out of it.
Understandably, these are not the people who sustain film careers or show up at the box office to see the same movie for the fourth time. These are not the people who shape cultural legacy. You cannot abandon your core audience and expect the algorithm to save you in the long run, especially when fandom is the mechanism that turns admiration into endurance.
The gender lens, double standards, and possible redemption
Recently, I listened to an interview with Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and she said something that snapped everything into focus for me:
“[Men] treat [acting] like it’s a sport. They treat it like the Olympics.”
This is how Timothée talks about acting now, as if it is a competition with a finish line and a podium and a prize to be won.
He doesn’t seem to view it as a craft or a collaboration anymore. His persona doesn’t align with that of someone who views the art of acting as a vulnerable, porous exchange between director, actor, story, and audience.
His persona aligns more with someone who experiences acting as a contest of domination. Is there anyone who honestly believes the Academy would ever be down to award that on the public stage?
I also read Kristen Stewart’s recent interview with The New York Times, where she (unintentionally) dismantles the very myth Timothée is currently inhaling.
She describes male actors pounding their chests (literally) before emotional scenes, trying to pump themselves out of the vulnerability the craft demands. She describes the way men contort performance into something “heroic” simply to avoid the embarrassment inherent to the work.
“Performance is inherently vulnerable and therefore quite embarrassing and unmasculine. There’s no bravado in suggesting that you’re a mouthpiece for someone else’s ideas. It’s inherently submissive… Men are aggrandized for retaining self… If they can protrude out of the vulnerability and feel like a gorilla pounding their chest before they cry on camera, it’s a little less embarrassing. It also makes it seem like a magic trick, like it is so impossible to do what you’re doing that nobody else could do it.”
Right now, it’s still impossible to tell for sure if Timothée’s behavior is the posture of a young actor terrified of embarrassment, terrified of vulnerability, terrified of being small. It feels maybe too irrational to assume he resorts to bigness, overconfidence, bravado, and a chest-pounding gorilla act to mask fear.
Instead, to me, this is a misguided PR strategy, a priming for an audience that will ultimately lead to the end of a serious acting career. Whether it’s for a future rap or Twitch career, the pivot is leading Chalamet directly into the trap Stewart is describing: mistaking ego for artistry, disruption for depth, and most evidently, self-mythology for mastery.
This is the antithesis of serious acting.
And the ultimate twist in this bizarre journey is that Marty Supreme, the very film he is supposed to be promoting, is a gorgeous and pointed story about this exact downfall. A cautionary tale about ambition devouring oneself to the point of losing everything you worked so hard for in the first place. A warning against confusing hunger with hubris.
That said, it is not too late for Timmy. Another pivot, one in the right direction, could be (and should be) coming. A24 wants the Oscar. Safdie wants the Oscar. His team wants the Oscar. Timothée himself really wants the Oscar. And his performance in Marty Supreme genuinely is extraordinary enough to contend for gold if the narrative can be stabilized.
But from where we currently stand, if he continues down this road, if the persona continues to eclipse the work, if the bravado continues to sour the narrative, then Timothée Chalamet and Marty Supreme will lose out on prestigious recognition; not because of the quality of the film, but because of the folly surrounding it.
Let me be clear: A24’s marketing for this film has been nothing short of brilliant. The film is my top pick of the year. It will likely break even at the box office quickly. But make no mistake, no matter what he says, Timothée’s end game is (and always will be) the statuette. It was well within his reach at one point but each day spent capitulating to the attention economy has further distanced him from serious awards consideration.
There is time to dial it back, water down the charade, course-correct and let the work speak louder than the act, but the clock is ticking. And now critics, studios, voters, and the fans who once adored him are all waiting in the wings to see whether he retreats from the brink or collapses into the tragic arc he was only supposed to portray on screen.
