Only Timothée Chalamet Could Get Away With This

At a party recently, a friend posed a question I’d never heard before. “Have you been blimp-fluenced yet?” she asked me. “Blimp-fluenced?” I replied. “You know, the Timothée Chalamet blimp,” she clarified. Ah, yes, of course I knew the Timothée Chalamet blimp. It’s the streak of orange that’s been hovering over Los Angeles for weeks with the title of Chalamet’s new film, Marty Supreme , emblazoned across its side. I’d spotted it once, appearing like a thought bubble above the Hollywood sign. Chalamet—or, at least, the braggadocious version of himself in a video he posted on Instagram last month—had pitched the airship as part of his master plan to make the movie “one of the most important things that happens on planet Earth this year.” In an 18-minute staged Zoom session with the film’s marketing team, he proposed drenching landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty in orange paint. And not just any orange: “Hard-core orange, corroded orange, falling-apart orange, rusted orange,” he explained. The whole scheme is stupidly brilliant and brilliantly stupid, emblematic of just how unusual Marty Supreme ’s rollout—and Chalamet’s press-tour persona—has been. The actor began cultivating his eccentric approach to marketing this time last year, while promoting the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown . Back then, he defied expectations of a movie star headlining an Oscar-courting drama: He popped up at his own look-alike contest, rode a Lime bike onto a red carpet, and used his acceptance speech at the Screen Actors Guild Awards to emphasize his ambition to become “one of the greats.” Now he’s gone beyond generating headlines for his idiosyncrasy. Chalamet’s M.O. thus far has been to make everything about Marty Supreme , and Marty Supreme only: He’s been dressing almost exclusively in orange—excuse me, “hard-core orange”—or in the limited supply of Marty Supreme merchandise . He appears at events flanked by an army of Ping-Pong-ball-headed foot soldiers ; the film is about a flashy Ping-Pong player, so the surreal (and slightly terrifying) costume tracks. The Statue of Liberty has not been doused in orange, but it might as well be. Read: The celebrity look-alike contest boom What Chalamet has been doing feels defiantly risky. Amid a fresh round of Oscar buzz for his performance in Marty Supreme , Chalamet is actively rejecting the contender playbook. Instead, he’s cementing himself as a one-man marketing machine, unabashed about his attention-seeking and box-office dreams. Forget the glitzy galas considered essential stops for awards hopefuls; even when he appears on late-night TV, shows up on the cover of Vogue , or participates in a Q&A sponsored by Vanity Fair , Chalamet turns his Marty Supreme talk into a vehicle for self-aggrandizement. That discussion often includes emphasizing how badly he wants to be respected for his body of work—an admission that’s usually considered gauche. Somehow, though, Chalamet has skirted major repercussions for his cockiness. That’s in part because he’s a young man embodying the familiar archetype of the egotistical striver, and in part because he has...

Preview: ~500 words