Making Himself Known | Timothée Chalamet Stars as Himself in SBIFF Conversation with Josh Brolin

For an actor to have starred in not just ONE, but TWO Academy Award Best Picture nominated films in one year is quite extraordinary, but as Timothée Chalamet said on Tuesday night, he’s just getting started. The 29-year-old — who had top billing in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part 2, as well as in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown — was celebrated with the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Arlington Artist of the Year Award on February 11, a prestigious achievement-retrospective honor that is certainly unusual for one so young.

But there’s nothing very “usual” about Chalamet, who was the youngest Best Actor Oscar nominee since 1939 for his breakout role as a lovestruck teenager in Luca Guadagnino’s coming-of-age film Call Me By Your Name in 2017. In a highly entertaining interview with Josh Brolin — Chalamet’s co-star in the Dune films and a surprise (at least to the audience) last minute addition to the Arlington award program, who joked that during the filming of Dune was “the first time that I have ever been called an old man” — they discussed much of Chalamet’s work in a collegial and affectionate fashion that was a nice contrast to the typically more formal tribute interviews.

Brought up in a performing arts family in New York City, Chalamet got cheers from the audience when he said, “I’m really a product of public arts education.” He credits his experiences at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts with fostering the desire to be an actor. “I fell in love with it immediately,” said Chalamet, who followed his older sister Pauline Chalamet (currently starring in Mindy Kaling’s HBO Max series The Sex Lives of College Girls) to the performing arts high school, which the film Fame is famously based on.