Timothée Chalamet Tells Us All About His Long-Awaited Martin Scorsese Collab

Julian Ungano/Courtesy of Chanel

Last spring, Timothée Chalamet and Martin Scorsese shot a commercial for the fragrance Bleu de Chanel in New York City. They were photographed on the streets of SoHo and burned the midnight oil together on elevated train stations in Astoria. “We were in Queens at four in the morning and he was bounding up the subway stairs,” Chalamet told us in a November 2023 cover story, recalling his time with the then 80-year-old director. The commercial, a 90-second film inspired by Federico Fellini’s 1968 short Toby Dammit, is more moodboard for a feeling than hard sell for a scent. It’s fun. It’s cool. It’s very, very bleu. “Strong images that tell a story in 60 seconds [or 90] is probably the most difficult thing to do,” Scorsese emphasizes in the Behind the Scenes featurette. The commercial, which was due out last fall, was delayed through the winter—prompting the Chalamet sleuths to pound the internet pavement, digging deeply for answers to where this sleek gem of a short film might’ve gone.

Well, at long last, here she is:

To mark the occasion of its release, Chalamet popped his head up from Dylan-land, the world he’s been living in while shooting James Mangold’s biopic A Complete Unknown these past couple months. When filming, Chalamet is good at disconnecting from the daily churn. He was back in New York. Head down. Hiding out. Out only on occasion. He’d just eaten dinner at Ci Siamo, which—on the theme of luxe scents—he identified as possessing the reigning best smell in New York: “You’re almost suspicious,” he said. “It’s like, is this curated? Is this what 4DX is?”

He called me when he got home from that dinner, as the clock struck midnight on Mother’s Day.

GQ: Hey, Happy Mother’s Day. Ci Siamo. Here we are.

Timothee Chalamet: Yeah. Here we are. OK. Happy Mother’s Day!

Did you get your mom a gift?

Yeah, definitely. She’s with my sister, on the west coast. So, we already did a little loop. We went to see Stereophonic before she left town. It’s great.

So it’s been about a year since you filmed this commercial for Bleu de Chanel with Martin Scorsese. When you think back to those days you spent filming in SoHo last spring, is there a moment or an image or a piece of direction that pops into your mind?

Well, two pop in. One is going to Marty’s house for the first time and having dinner there and discussing the commercial in broad strokes, and where he’s pulling inspiration from. Like Fellini, and the original Bleu de Chanel ad he shot with Gaspard Ulliel, I want to say maybe 13 years before we did ours. So that jumps out to me because it just felt wonderfully familiar.

And the other thing that jumps out is just on the first day of shooting, immediately realizing how much of Marty’s talent lay in just being open to whatever was happening in the moment. For instance, like this camera slamming into my chest by accident. And that take being used in the spot now. And it’s a lesson worth learning a thousand times, whether it’s as an actor or as a director or as a creative in general, that, you know, mistakes are your best friend, even when you’re Martin Scorsese.

So how did that happen, exactly?

It’s just that it was literally Day One, so you’re working with a new crew, and a new camera person and a new—just everyone is feeling each other out, for the camera folks and a new actor. Maybe we would’ve rehearsed more if we weren’t shooting in New York, in such a public setting, in front of people on the street. I probably…well I was gonna say I probably overshot my mark, but I didn’t because I was just busting out of a building. [laughs] We just didn’t get it right. But that [take is] in the spot now. And like I said, it was evidence to me in the moment that, of course, being a masterful director is made up of great ability to execute over decades of experience and decades of being inspired by the greats, but it’s also, you know, working with what’s given to you, even when you’re Martin Scorsese. It was a great way to jump in, from my point of view.

It reminds me of that very funny moment in the beginning of Shine a Light when Scorsese and the crew are setting up the lights to shoot a live Stones concert. And the movie lights are scorching the stage, and he’s just like: We cannot burn Mick Jagger. We want the effect, but we can’t burn him. It’s the same here. You don’t want to knock Timothée Chalamet out, or break three ribs on the first day.

[laughs] He wasn’t as worried here.

And so you guys rush through this shoot, it’s very quick, it’s very efficient, and then you go your separate ways. In the fall, you reunited for a Bleu de Chanel dinner and the conversation you filmed for us. How has your relationship evolved since the commercial shoot?

Well, I had met him originally with Leo years before, as I was getting ready to do the [Bob Dylan] movie that I’m doing now. Because of Marty’s obvious involvement with the subject matter. But also because he was getting dinner with Robbie Robertson that night. So I met him there. And by the time we did the Chanel spot, there was some familiarity. Then, you know, an actual familiarity forms, and I can only speak from my side, but I think, even with the generational gap, I think our creative and New York sensibilities were aligned enough that we were able to have that great conversation for you guys. And it just got more familiar.

I think the commercial was sort of a great creative setting to meet on. It wasn’t really a high-pressure thing. Obviously there’s a greater purpose to create something for Chanel there, but on a much more basic elemental level, it was getting to meet as two creatives, and do what he does masterfully, and me acting, and on a playing field that doesn’t have the pressures and realities of working on a movie for three to six months that has some sort of bottom line to it.

It just feels very open and creative and free in a way that’s certainly different.

Yeah, and I’m very grateful to Chanel there as a brand, not as some corporate talking point, but it really was free rein with Marty and also Alfonso [Gomez-Rejon], who Marty wrote the script with, to kind of just cook up what we wanted. They let us work on this the way we wanted as opposed to being focus-group driven or what I imagine to be how other product things go down. And that kind of speaks to the legacy of the brand and their support for the creative arts, which is really, I mean genuinely, they have a whole film department there, a legacy-film department, that even helps in the production of period films. Not the one that I’m working on right now. But other ones.

The last time I saw you, in the fall, he had just had you over for a private screening of Killers of the Flower Moon. They just close the door and you’re in there for three-and-a-half hours?

Yeah. He has this production office, we had some pickup stuff to do on the commercial, not shooting anything but some ADR stuff. And getting the chance to see a new Martin Scorsese movie in his production office wasn’t something that I was going to pass up. Because, you know, you just feel the spirits in the room when you get to see where something was cut or conceived. And I was sort of floored by it. I thought it was inspiring, from Marty’s direction, but really from Leo and Lily Gladstone’s performances, and Jesse Plemons. It also got me into David Grann. Whose book-ography, or whatever you want to call it, I’ve devoured since.

Tell me about your Grann phase.

I finished The Lost City of Z. And I just finished The Wager. The Wager is just awesome. I just sat there and finished the whole thing in a day.

Have you and Scorsese spoken much since the fall? Have you discussed any future projects?

I saw him at the Golden Globes. I know he’s working on this Frank Sinatra biopic, or at least that’s the rumor. No, but I would love to do something with him. But I also think I already got the best crack at it in the sense that I got to do something with Marty on the streets of New York. And he was even saying as we shot it that it reminded him of shooting After Hours. In the sense that it was kind of run-and-gun.

I think he’s creatively attuned to grander things in his films right now. Which is awesome for us as viewers. But what we did was more in the vein of—and, yes, it’s a commercial and it’s 90 seconds, and I’m obviously not putting it in the category of After Hours or, y'know, Mean Streets or anything like that—but it was a much more of a run-and-gun exercise. Even the shot of the camera hitting me. And just having to knock something out in five days, it resembles those New York films more than a six-month sweeping shoot in Oklahoma.

The last time we were talking, for the November 2023 cover, it was right on the precipice of these two films—Wonka and Dune: Part 2—and now, obviously, your head is in a different place on Dylan. But when you kind of look over your shoulder back at what just happened, how do you regard it?

With just an enormous amount of gratitude. And gratitude to jump into something new right away, too. I feel earlier in my career, and the success of other projects, I questioned what the best way was to appreciate them. And this time, I feel like I’ve done it the right way—if there is a right way and there can be a right way—which is to simply take it as a green light to keep working on the things I want to work on that are inspiring to me. And to keep my head down and, you know, keep pounding my nail into the wall.

That’s probably the more contextualized feeling. The real feeling is I’m just so locked in on this other thing. Because I do work in this strange medium where things take years to come out, so I do feel like I’m 37 miles down the path.

You’re living in the future, movies-wise.

Right.

What about this Travolta thing? With the box-office success of Wonka and Dune: Part II, you were the first actor since John Travolta to have two major box-office hits out within eight months of one another. Or something like that. It’s not like one of those things where people were waiting around wondering, like, When will this record be broken? But it’s a useful metric to articulate a feeling in the air: These were two smash hits with the same guy at the center of them. What of it?

[long pause] I mean, it’s gonna sound pretentious, but it really just encouraged me to keep using the shades of color or paint that I want to use when I do, and the older I get, the more, or even talking to Marty about After Hours, when it came out and how it stood up over time as opposed to the initial reaction. You really just gotta pay attention to whatever you’re working on in the moment. Like: All right, let me just continue to trust what I want to work on, big or small.

Give me a Knicks prediction.

Holy shit. I’m gonna say Knicks in six in this series. And then we’ll see about Boston.

Have you been to a playoff game yet?

No, I've been so locked in on this movie. This call is about the most exciting and different thing I’ve done in two months, I swear to God.

But if the Knicks are in an Eastern Conference Finals, you will emerge.

Absolutely. Definitely. I’ll be there.

Originally Appeared on GQ