"But I have genuine fear of having the inability to replicate this moment again." "Fuck yeah, while it's going on, I'm going to enjoy every second of this-it sounds cheesy, but I think of myself as an actor third, an artist second, and a fan first," he said. Often there seem to be two competing forces pulling at either arm: the desire to let everything in, to not take any of this good fortune for granted, while also contending with a constant low-level fear of losing the thing he's only just grabbed hold of. His is a brimming exuberance that's reined in by a sober conscientiousness. ("They're gonna revive Tiger Beat just for him," Gerwig has put it.) He's taller than he comes off in Call Me by Your Name (at six feet, he's dwarfed on-screen by co-star Armie Hammer's five extra inches) and has an angular face that looks to require shaving once or twice a year. He has the body of a kid raised in New York, stovepiped like a Stroke, the sort of frame that's forged in high schools without football teams. Timothée (pronounced "Timothy," not " Tee-mo-tay": "I don't want to be totally unrelatable") has an antic energy, a rubber-ball bounciness. That knowledge that no matter how quiet it may still be now, there's no fighting physics. The more I was around it, the more it reminded me of that skin-prickling sensation that hangs in the air between seeing a flash of lightning and hearing the crack of thunder. While it was the beginning of something enormous for him, it was also, a little sadly, the end of something else-the very last days of the first part of his life. In early January, for a week bridging the Golden Globes, I got to spend time with Timothée Chalamet in that awesome window of in-between-ity-when he very much perceived what was happening to him without fully realizing the extent to which his life was being altered. The only thing weirder than being famous, it seems, is living in that brief space between completing a fame-making thing and that fame-making thing registering fully. Shirt, $250, pants, $995, by Coach 1941 / Boots, $2,030, by Berluti / Bracelet, his own The effect of that final shot is that it tunnels one's vision on this unknown face-rosy-ringed around the eyes, a sweetness in the whites-and articulates, as the actor will later put it, "what the scene is about, and in many ways what this movie is about-time lost, love lost, regret that love wasn't pursued more fully, more quickly." The lingering shot keeps audiences soldered to their seats and sears a potent idea in their minds: that this 20-year-old is someone it is thrilling to have just met, out of the blue like this, someone we will no doubt see again-maybe even for the rest of our lives. How does a single movie scene transform a life? Here's how: Little does he know that this day, this scene, will serve as the inflection point of his nascent life. The longing and nostalgia and love are real, and the actor is a conduit. This final shot, it goes and goes and goes and goes, and just when people who watch a lot of movies think it's going to end, it goes a little more. The director, having witnessed "a consistent and constant surprise, and yet not a surprise at all," as he'd put it later, in the roiling preternatural performance by this no-name New Yorker, films three takes-each four minutes long, matched to the length of the end-credit song that the actor hears in his earpiece, and against which the actor's face communicates most registers of the hurting side of the heart. It is the third-to-last day of production, and the hurt is real for the young actor and it is settling in-this is like nothing he's ever experienced before, and he's twisted up about it, because others who have been around a lot longer than he has are saying the same thing, that this experience is singular.
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