Wonka director knew Timothée Chalamet was right for the role after seeing his high-school musical performances

Last Updated on November 20, 2023

Timothée Chalamet may be starring in big-budget movies like Dune: Part Two and Wonka these days, but it wasn’t all that long ago that he was giving it his all on the high-school stage. Videos of a teenage Timothée Chalamet, or should I say Lil’ Timmy Tim, have been circulating for years on YouTube with millions of views. Wonka director Paul King was well aware of these videos and told Rolling Stone that they played a part in Chalamet landing the leading role.

Paul King said that Timothée Chalamet didn’t even have to audition for Wonka. “It was a straight offer because he’s great and he was the only person in my mind who could do it,” King said. “But because he’s Timothée Chalamet and his life is so absurd, his high school musical performances are on YouTube and have hundreds of thousands of views. So I knew from stanning for Timmy Chalamet that he could sing and dance really well.“

King continued, “I knew that was in his arsenal, but I didn’t know how good he was. When I spoke to him he was quite keen. He’d done tap dancing in high school and he was like, ‘I’d quite like to show people I can do that.’“

The recently released trailer for Wonka set the stage for what Paul King calls a “proper” musical that pays homage to the “golden age of MGM musicals.“ But that doesn’t mean that the film is lacking the darker side found in Roald Dahl’s novels. “Certainly, I tried to have darker characters than [what] you would find in a ‘Paddington’ movie, for example,” King said. “It’s a crueler world and it’s a meaner world that Willy Wonka finds himself in because that’s the sort of city that Charlie grows up in. Unlike the ‘Paddington’world, not everyone is nice in a Roald Dahl world. I definitely got to play with those grotesque ideas, but I hope not to damage a generation of children.“

It’s going to be a busy year for Timothée Chalamet, as Dune: Part Two is slated to hit theaters on November 3rd, followed by Wonka on December 15th.