The Oscars are drawing near and you can cut the tension with a knife. Nowhere more so than in the best actor category. Until recently the award was Adrien Brody’s to lose, but news that some of his Hungarian scenes were augmented with pronunciation-correcting AI may have derailed his chances.
This appears to have opened a pathway for Timothée Chalamet to be frontrunner, for his role in A Complete Unknown. And in true Oscars-campaign style, that means he now has to go out and convince people that he comprehensively transformed into Bob Dylan. It is time for Chalamet to spellbind the world by revealing that he put on some weight for the film.
During a recent appearance on NPR’s All Things Considered, Chalamet said: “I did all the work, like you just described, physicality-, behaviour-wise. But something we haven’t really talked about, I also put on 20lbs because … believe it or not, I was thinner than the guy, you know?”
Now this sort of thing is important to Chalamet’s campaign. For the last few months, most of the coverage he has received was essentially for being an adorable goofball. He’s the sort of person who attends his own lookalike contests and hires Lime bikes to get to his premieres. And this is great if you want to fill up the internet, but an Oscar is like a maths exam: if you want to win, you have to show your workings.
Chalamet had already started doing so. He performed Dylan songs on Saturday Night Live this weekend, as himself, to show voters that he really can sing and play guitar. He has been loudly telling everyone that he worked with a dialogue coach to sound like Dylan, and a movement coach to move like him. He told Zane Lowe that he spent half a decade – a sixth of his life – working with a harmonica coach for the scenes in which he has to make a noise like he’s accidentally trodden on a goose.
But the weight stuff is trickier territory. Presumably Chalamet saw what talking about dramatic weight change had done for the Oscars hopes of other actors. Robert De Niro won one after gaining a huge amount of weight for Raging Bull. Tom Hanks won for Philadelphia, having progressively lost weight as the shoot went on. Christian Bale has done both, winning an Oscar after losing weight for The Fighter and getting nominated after gaining a lot for Vice. If they can do it, why not him?
This is a question with good answers. First, their transformations were for solid dramatic reasons. De Niro wanted to portray decline, Bale bulked up to play a real-life figure he didn’t resemble, and Hanks was playing a man dying of Aids. You could argue, if you felt like it, that Chalamet’s portrayal of Dylan wouldn’t have been affected at all if he’d not put on any weight.
Second, what made those transformations notable was that, you know, you actually noticed them. It was startling to see De Niro puffed up and bloated after spending most of Raging Bull in peak physical condition. On the other hand Chalamet is a skinny man in a film about another skinny man. His Dylan still spends the duration of it wearing clothes that appear to have been designed for dolls. He looks like he could curl up and sleep in his guitar case. To watch A Complete Unknown is still to worry that Chalamet might get taken out by a moderately strong breeze.
True, if you really inspect stills from the movie, you can just about see that Chalamet’s jawline is very slightly softer than usual. But only if you squint. I guarantee nobody rubbed their eyes in disbelief after seeing a poster for A Complete Unknown because their minds couldn’t comprehend the unendurable transformation Timothée Chalamet had to go through to become Bob Dylan. Which sort of makes it redundant to brag about gaining weight for the role.
In the end, hopefully this will be meaningless. Academy voters will be able to look past negligible aspects such as unnoticeable weight gain or artificially augmented Hungarian vowel sounds and simply give the award to the best performance. Which is Ralph Fiennes’, but that’s probably beside the point.
