Why Timothée Chalamet Dropped Out of College

Welcome to Life Lessons. This week we revisited our 2017 interview with New Yorker and Marty Supreme star Timothée Chalamet and his mentor, Matthew McConaughey. At the time, the 21-year-old Chalamet was about release Call Me By Your Name, the film that would skyrocket him into Hollywood’s A-List, but the young actor and college dropout still had a lot to learn. As he told  McConaughey, “I’m in the watching stage.”

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“I do find that there’s a fine balance between preparation and seeing what happens naturally.”

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“Right now, working on a project called Beautiful Boy, trying to follow in the footsteps of committed performances and performers—I’m playing a heroin and methamphetamine addict. I lost weight to help accurately capture the dark stages of the drug.”

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“I want to attack and to lead my life with vigor, but I’m in the watching stage at the moment. Younger actors feel pressure to bring a pop to every scene, as the roles get bigger, I’m finding you can add layers and do less scene-to-scene.”

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“I did a year at Columbia, and I just kind of floundered. Maybe it wasn’t the right place for me. Columbia takes a wholehearted academic commitment that I think I have in me, but it was just not where my mind was at the time. I’d just left working a month and a half in Canada with my favorite director and you, one of my favorite actors, and had to go back into a structured environment. It was just hard.”

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“I left school after a year, got an apartment in the Bronx, where I had some family years ago, and have since been getting a nice steady stream of work. I couldn’t be more grateful.”

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“Now that my foot is in the door, I’m locked and loaded. I’m focused.”