Timothée Chalamet Reveals Why He Lost Out on ‘Maze Runner’ and ‘Divergent’ Roles

Timothée Chalamet is a well-known actor in Hollywood and is in very high demand today, despite the fact that he appeared – very early in his career – in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (this is a role only die-hard fans will remember, probably).

Recently, though, Chalamet has been landing big movie roles after his successful performances in the Oscar-nominated films Lady Bird, Call Me by Your Name, and Little Women. His two most recent works, Wonka and the Dune trilogy, have both been huge bestsellers.

As Chalamet is waiting for the release of his Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, he gave a very interesting interview to Rolling Stone magazine, in which he discussed his early career on film.

While he is today best-known as a dramatic actor who picks (more or less) complex and layered roles, Chalamet revealed that he wanted to take a completely different path early in his career and that the rejections he faced “forced” him, in a way, to reconsider his choices, which turned out to be the best decision in his life.

If you look at Chalamet’s filmography, you’ll mostly see drama films with complex roles. Sure, we have Wonka, which is a children’s musical, and the Dune trilogy, a sci-fi epic, but films such as Lady Bird, Call Me by Your Name, Beautiful Boy, and Little Women dominate his filmography. His next movie, A Complete Unknown, is also a drama, a biopic about the famed singer Bob Dylan.

Such roles have become the focus of Chalamet’s career, and we generally associate him with them.

If you remember, we recently reported that the actor said that he would consider a superhero role (now) only if there was a great script and a great director attached, so fans shouldn’t hold their breath for him to appear in a major action or superhero franchise. But it wasn’t like that in the beginning.

In a recent interview for Rolling Stone, Chalamet talked about his early career and how a string of rejections actually “forced” him to consider indie projects (like Call Me by Your Name), which turned out to be a great moment for him. As said, Chalamet initially auditioned for hit action franchises Maze Runner and Divergent, but he did not get the roles:

I would always get the same feedback, ‘Oh, you don’t have the right body.’ I had an agent call me once and say, ‘I’m tired of getting the same feedback. We’re gonna stop submitting you for these bigger projects, because you’re not putting on weight.’ I was trying to put on weight. I couldn’t! I basically couldn’t. My metabolism or whatever the fuck couldn’t do it. I was knocking on one door that wouldn’t ope. So I went to what I thought was a more humble door, but actually ended up being explosive for me.

Source: Rolling Stone

While we can understand Divergent, it is unclear how he was unfit for a role in Maze Runner (Newt, anyone?), but whatever they thought of him at the time, it turned out to be their loss and a major victory for cinema in general, which is why we’re quite happy that it turned out like this because we got to see much more of Chalamet than we would have.

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