Timothée Chalamet reveals Hollywood advice from Leonardo DiCaprio
Last year, Timothée Chalamet, star of Dune, The French Dispatch and the upcoming Wonka, revealed he’d been warned off superhero movies by his hero. Now he’s revealed who this devil on his shoulder was: none other than Leonardo DiCaprio.
In a profile for Vogue, Chalamet finally dished on where he’d heard the best Hollywood advice he’d ever gotten. He met DiCaprio in 2018, and the A-lister passed on a simple creed: “No hard drugs, and no superhero movies”. Simple and to the point, and something that Chalamet has taken to heart seeing as he still hasn’t bee associated with either the MCU or the DCEU.
These rules might sound cynical on DiCaprio’s part, but it’s made him a particular kind of Tinseltown icon. By working exclusively on drama movies and romance movies from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Baz Luhrmann, and Quentin Tarantino, he’s maintained star status as a draw in and of himself. That’s becoming rare, although Chalamet is very much positioned to have a similar arc.
That’s not to say DiCaprio doesn’t do blockbusters. He was in James Cameron’s disaster movie Titanic, and Christopher Nolan’s science fiction movie Inception after all. But they were one-off features by directors that have distinctive approaches to their filmmaking.
DiCaprio has tended to be quite discerning in his choices, and so far Chalamet is doing the same. The closest to franchising is his work with Denis Villeneuve on Dune, and even then, that’s looking like a trilogy at most, rather than an indefinite series of films.
He’ll make his Disney movie debut next year in Wonka. Wonder if DiCaprio had any wisdom to impart on musicals?
