Timothée Chalamet Was Told to ‘Put on Weight,’ He Didn’t ‘Have the Right Body’ for Movies Like Maze Runner, Divergent

Timothée Chalamet was told to gain weight early on in his career.

During an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, published Nov. 11, the 28-year-old actor opened up about his struggle landing movie roles when his career began, recalling the moment an agent even told him that he didn’t have the body type for it.

“If I auditioned for The Maze Runner or Divergent, things of that variety that were popping when I was coming up, the feedback was always, ‘Oh, you don’t have the right body,’” he shared. 

“I had an agent that called me and said, ‘You got to put on weight,’ basically — not aggressively, but you know,” he added.

Chalamet told Lowe that this experience helped him relate to and connect with Bob Dylan. He’s portraying Dylan the “End of the Line” singer in the upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown.

“I can relate to some of these things he went through,” he said. “Bob wanted to be a rock & roll star — Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Elvis Presley — that was the sort of, depending on your point of view, the sort of rice crispy pop, rock & roll music that was saturated and marketed to kids in the late ’50s. Equally, I wanted to be a big movie actor.”

Chalamet explained that instead of trying to put on weight or change his body type, he discovered a “very personal style” of films that worked for him, pointing out his roles in Call Me By Your Name, Beautiful Boy, Lady Bird, Little Women, Miss Stevens and Hot Summer Nights.

“I found my way into these very personalized movies,” he said. “For [Dylan], it was folk music. He couldn’t keep a rock & roll band because they would all get hired by other kids that had more money, literally, in Minnesota. So for me, it was finding a very personal style movie.”

“Those were smaller budget, but very — I don’t know how else to put it — personable movies that started in this theater space. This is where I found my rhythm, my confidence, my flow, whatever you want to call it,” he continued.