With the press run for Timothée Chalamet’s latest movie, “Marty Supreme,” sparking recent controversies, it seems that audiences have grown displeased with the actor. While everyone is entitled to their own critiques, I draw the line at criticisms of his craft.
From 2025 to present day, people have claimed that Chalamet has grown an irritating ego. It started when he made his notorious speech at the 2025 Screen Actors Guild Awards, now the Actor Awards.
“I’m really in the pursuit of greatness,” Chalamet said in his speech. “I want to be one of the greats; I’m inspired by the greats.”
He went on to shout out people like Viola Davis and Marlon Brando as those greats.
People really took this speech to heart and criticized Chalamet for not being humble. This take has always confused me. Chalamet didn’t claim to be great yet – just that he aspired to be. He said that he is on the path to greatness, which is true.
Chalamet is 30 years old. He received a lead actor nomination at the Academy Awards when he was only 22 years old. Since then, he has gotten three other Oscars nominations and been a part of eight films nominated for Best Picture.
Since I became a fan of him in 2019, I can’t remember an award season where Chalamet wasn’t around, and it will continue to be this way. This is why I don’t care that he hasn’t won his Oscar yet; he’ll be back next year.
It’s clear that Chalamet has range. He has played the tragic Paul Atreides in the “Dune” franchise, Bob Dylan, Willy Wonka and a cannibal in “Bones and All,” among other roles. I doubt there’s a role that Chalamet couldn’t set his mind to attain.
This goes into the preparation for his work. For “Marty Supreme,” he excessively practiced table tennis for seven years, beginning four years before the movie started filming and while working on other projects. According to Rolling Stone, in preparation for “A Complete Unknown,” Chalamet worked with a guitar teacher, a dialect coach, a movement coach and a harmonica teacher. He did all the singing as Dylan in the biopic.
During a CNN and Variety Town Hall event, Chalamet stated that “no one cares” about the ballet or opera industries anymore. Due to those comments, people have begun to fully turn on Chalamet. While I agree it was a bad choice for him to say that, I also believe people are overacting – people are acting like he murdered somebody. Awards season is long over, and people are still trying to make discourse about it.
People have gone as far as to claim that Chalamet has changed from when he first stepped into the spotlight. Chalamet has always been the same. In fact, there is a TikTok posted by @thealienstookover with a clip of Chalamet during a promo for his movie “The King,” where he said, “I started to get it was a sense of opera or ballet or something. It’s kind of, like, a dying art form, or something.” This shows that Chalamet has always felt this way, and nobody cared back then. Why are people holding pitchforks to him about it now?
The Hollywood Reporter recently came out with an article titled “It’s Time for a Chalamet Break,” which couldn’t be further from the truth. What’s wrong with an actor working hard and being constantly booked? Their main point was that Chalamet could disappear before “Dune: Part Three” releases, and that it would make him appealing to general audiences again.
Chalamet doesn’t need to go away. His work and the films he’s in speak for that. Despite “Marty Supreme” getting no Oscar wins, Chalamet still got the most awards of the 2025 awards season, with 26 Best Actor awards for his portrayal of Marty Mauser. His Oscar win is coming in due time; it’s inevitable. Even if he gets the Leonardo DiCaprio treatment by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it will come.
Chalamet is going to be here for a very long time. Even if you can’t stand him, you’ll probably watch a movie with him in it in the future, and it might just be one you enjoy. Stop trying to deny greatness because someone who knows exactly who they are scares you.
