Venice. Bright sun, 26 degrees outside temperature. A Filmstarts colleague and I are standing at the dock where the celebrities arrive by ferry during the film festival and have been waiting for the cast of Bones and All for 30 minutes. More specifically, Timothée Chalamet. Our goal: Record stories for Instagram as part of the festival coverage. Or at least try. Because dozens of people are standing in front of us with magazines and handicrafts that they want to have signed. If any celebrity walks by here, I’ll have to film over the heads in front of me, just to be on the safe side.
When “Timmy!!!!”, I gather from the screams around me, finally gets off the boat and walks towards the festival palace, my camera switches off. It’s “too hot,” says my cell phone. The moment in which Dune-Star Timothee Chalamet walks over the carpet, it suddenly becomes “too hot”?! If that were a punchline in a film, I would find it too flat.
After almost a minute and a half of chaos and the frenetic roar of the people around us, my Filmstarts colleague left contentedly. Upload his video. I stay behind defiantly and make a decision: the waiting time should not have been in vain. I will upload an insta story from Timothée and if it’s the last thing i do!
If only I had known what I was getting myself into…
Sorry, Bones and All: The most important thing about film festivals are the stars
©MGM
Tayler Russell (left) and Timothée Chalamet in Bones and All
It’s a misconception that the most important thing about film festivals is the films. For media professionals and cineastes yes, of course. We at Moviepilot always report diligently for you. But for most people, the Berlinale, Cannes or Venice have a different appeal: you are one Chance to get a little closer to the really big Hollywood stars. At least if you get up early enough.
On the day of the premiere of Bones and All, dozens of fans gathered in front of the red carpet barrier in the early hours of the morning. By noon their number had multiplied. Everywhere self-painted posters, printed photos and umbrellas, so as not to die of heat stroke before the big moment in the evening. According to one of the posters a young woman wishes that Timothée Chalamet would eat things off her body. That seems logical to me. After all, he’s here to promote a (very good) cannibal romance.
But I don’t have time to ask her what kind of food she’s thinking about or what part of her body she would most likely sacrifice to her favorite celebrity. I have to go to the underground car park around the corner. Here, actors are picked up by cars after their press conferences and driven to the pompous (and impressively ugly) Excelsior Hotel.
When Dune star Timothée shows up, waiting fans turn into a mosh pit – and I’m right in the middle
A handful of people are already standing in front of the driveway, magazine covers with Timothée’s face and their smartphones at the ready. A press conference in Venice lasts around 30 minutes, often less. I can wait that long, I think, leaning on the barrier. Out of the corner of my eye I see a girl in a “Peach me” t-shirt. A nod to Chalamet’s breakthrough in Call Me by Your Name, in which the star, well, sex with a peach Has.
Check out the trailer for Call Me By Your Name here:
Call Me By Your Name – Trailer (German) HD
I stand in the blazing sun for over an hour and question all the decisions in my life that have brought me to this point. But leaving now would mean wasting large chunks of my day so far and still not having a story for Instagram. When Timothée Chalamet finally shows up and running purposefully towards the barrier, to which I am clinging, weakened and weakened, at first I think I am hallucinating. Quick-witted, I just about manage to record a short video. Then it suddenly feels like I’m in the middle of a mosh pit.
People appear from everywhere, pushing their way to the front, shouting “Timmy!!” scream. I get posters on the back of my head and elbows in my back, magazines stretched over my head towards the Hollywood star. Suddenly I get tunnel vision. I feel like Ursula from The Little Mermaid as I pop my head between the autograph sheets like a monstrous creature from the depths of the sea. I stare into Timothée Chalamet’s face and ask a questionwhich I never actually ask: “Can we take a picture together?”
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When I press the shutter button, my finger trembles a bit. I stare at my hand in disbelief as Timothée Chalamet moves on with a smile. here i stand sweaty, dehydrated and mentally drainedbetween yelling and jostling people who seem only one wrong decision away from stamping someone on the ground and starting a stampede – but is it really that different from them? I’ve got to get out of here. A few minutes later, at a safe distance, I’m looking for the perfect video for the Insta story, and a wave of shame washes over my body.
Flirting into the end of the world: Timothée Chalamet is the perfect star for our time
It was in Dune that I first consciously perceived Chalamet as attractive. An observation that quickly became a running gag on social media and in the podcast that I record weekly with a friend. One listener even wrote a multi-chapter fanfic just for fun! I’m not a hardcore fan, I don’t own t-shirts with his face on or regularly google who he’s dating. But I think he does is a very good actor who makes very interesting films. And I find it hilarious that people regularly send me pictures and memes of him and say: “Lisa, I had to think of you.”
I wouldn’t call myself an explicit fan, but I do understand why people want Timothée Chalamet to eat things off their body. After all, he is the perfect star for our time. A blend of young Johnny Depp’s mysteriously amused charm, Tilda Swinton’s androgynous wardrobe and HIM frontman Ville Vallo’s careless cool, albeit with a modernized, less rigid notion of masculinity. Add to that an acute understanding of the absolute mindfuck that is our existence. Climate change, absurd beauty standards, social media pressures, more mental illnesses than therapy places – we and the generations after us are screwed. And Timothy knows that.
Harry Styles likes at the Venice premiere of Don’t Worry, Darling overall more fans have gathered in front of the red carpet. However, he was subsequently shot for the most meaningless statement anyone could ever have fabricated about working on a film (“What I like best about the film is that it feels like a film”), mememed to death.
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Timothée Chalamet, on the other hand, is the culturally savvy, almost intellectual of the teen superstars, bringing exactly the kind of profound life negation to conversations that feel right for 2022. The quote that went around the world after the Bones and All press conference? “It’s hard being alive right now. I think the collapse of our society is in the air. It smells like it.” He threw his patented “drooping eyelids, barely visible smile” look at the assembled press representatives. The wet dream of every teenager who has just read Nietzsche for the first time.
A photo of Timothée Chalamet and I even ended up in the festival newspaper
My phone explodes after I post the photo of Timothée Chalamet and I. Hundreds of likes within a few minutes, dozens of excited messages, a separate thread is opened in the subreddit. On Twitter, a female Chalamet fan writes me in English, where I would have seen the actor exactly. She wants a list of all the places. Behind the festival palace, I say. After the press conference for the film. “Did you just meet him there?” she wants to know. I don’t answer anymore.
It feels like I’m part of a club now that I don’t want to be part of. Not because it’s wrong to wait hours for your stars or to paint sexually objectionable posters. Being a fan is great! But actually I really just wanted to share an exciting behind-the-scenes thing from the festival. And now suddenly I seem like a super fan posing as a journalistto grab selfies.
When I open one of the daily festival newspapers the next day, the situation finally turns absurd. Alongside red carpet photos, directly above X-Men star Nicholas Hoult, I see Timothée Chalamet in front of a wall of excited fans – and me in the middle. What remains of my time in Venice, along with a few articles and the realization that I will never be able to eat focaccia again, a photo that will forever stigmatize me as a superfan. At least until the social collapse predicted by Chalamet.
What was your most embarrassing fan moment?