I Need To Get Over Timothée Chalamet - ELLE September 2019
The Oscar-nominated, floral-suit-wearing statistics rap prodigy is ruining my life.
I once worked at a gossip magazine where part of my job was to write "funny" speech bubbles for celebrities. Mostly the pictures were of one of the Hemsworth brothers emerging from the ocean, eight-packed and glistening. But then a different kind of photo landed in my inbox. It was of Selena Gomez on the set of a yet-to-be-titled Woody Allen film kissing a floppy-haired millennial man. It may have been in a car, it may have been raining—all I know for sure is there was a tweed blazer, dark curls and the sound of angels singing. This was the moment my life split in two: before and after Timothée Chalamet.
The Timmy content came thick and fast. There were the movies: Call Me By Your Name, Hot Summer Nights, Beautiful Boy. The magazine features: that GQ profile with the streamers, Vanity Fair's Hollywood issue (with the below video that will haunt me for the rest of my days). The late night talk shows, and the old videos of him rapping about statistics in high school.
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Soon Dune, Little Women and The King will hit our screens. The premiere of the latter at the Venice Film Festival was the moment I had been dreading: the Beautiful Boy's red carpet debut with his co-star and real-life girlfriend, Lily-Rose Depp.
It's a couple that makes sense: they're both beautiful actors with delicate bone structures who like making out in the rain and eating fried chicken. Imagining them speaking in fluent French to each other in secret corners of the cities they're visiting delivers a special kind of pleasure (very sexy) mixed with pain (why can't it be me?).
I'd hoped their romance was staged, or at the very least, had fizzled out. I had not braced myself for the moment when, while posing for press, Timmy reached behind director David Michôd to stroke Lily-Rose's arm, and she squeezed his in return. There was no sound of angels, only my heart shattering. This was the moment I realised I needed help.
I know I'm not the only one dangerously close to starting a Timmy fan account. I'm not even the only one in this office. "A friend asked me who my dream man was and I said 'Timmy' without skipping a beat," ELLE's market editor, Samantha Wong, told me. "I don't think I've ever felt this way before and I want to cry." Same here.
Other celebrities love him too. Tyler, The Creator's song "Okra" has a line about the glow of Timothée's acne-free skin; Jennifer Lawrence is "buttering him up like a pig for slaughter"; Little Women and Lady Bird director Greta Gerwig called him a "heartthrob with acting chops"; and the French designer Haider Ackermann refers to Timothée, his muse, as "The Handsome Dude". People all over Twitter want him to run them over with his car.
So how do we get past this? Do we call some sort of intervention where everyone in the room needs help, or do we just embrace our love of the living, breathing Renaissance painting thirst trap that is Timothée?
We could follow WikiHow's three-part program for getting over your celebrity crush, which includes imagining that he's an awful person (impossible), distracting yourself by finishing a piece of art you've been working on (no, that Helga Pataki-style shrine doesn't count), or shoving a regular person into that Timothée Chalamet-shaped hole in your life (I'm sure every therapist would warn against transference).
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Or we could follow the science, which says it's actually not a bad thing to have a celebrity crush. Researchers call them parasocial relationships (which kind of sounds like parasites and that probably isn't incorrect). These relationships are one-sided, with one person putting in all the energy, interest and time, while the other person is completely unaware of their existence.
But this doesn't have to be a negative experience. The person putting in all the energy is the person with all the control: they can (at least try to) end the relationship when it suits them; there's no fear of awkward run-ins or rejections; and confessions of love don't need to be hidden in the pages of a diary, they can be shared with other likewise obsessed people. It's a bonding experience.
The heartthrobs we love are also representative of the times we're living in. Everyone's obsession with Lil' Timmy Tim could be indicative of the cultural shift from alpha-male sex icons to sensitive dudes who went to high schools without sports teams.
"He just seems so gentle" Sam told me when I asked her for all the reasons she loves him. "And aware—like, woke." The qualities that constitute modern masculinity have changed, and Timothée is definitely aware of that.
He and Harry Styles talked at length about toxic masculinity in a piece for iD (a genius move that was clearly orchestrated for Stan Tumblr) and after the continuing sexual abuse allegations surrounding Woody Allen came to light again, Timothée donated his entire salary from A Rainy Day In New York to charity.
Instead of curing my infatuation, research for this piece (which started as an excuse to look at pictures of Timmy all day and call it work) has made my obsession considerably worse. Yet I've never felt better about it.
If you're going to be in a parasocial relationship with someone, you could do worse than the guy who took his sister as his date to The Golden Globes and held his mum's hand at the Oscars.
Now there's only one thing left to wonder. If we were to meet and fall in love, would he call me by my name or his?
This story originally appeared on elle.com.au in September 2019. Images: Getty.