Chalamet came to international attention with the lead role of a lovestruck teenager in Luca Guadagnino's coming-of-age film Call Me by Your Name (2017), earning him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Timothée Hal Chalamet was born on December 27, 1995, in New York City, and grew up in the federally subsidized artists' building Manhattan Plaza in Hell's Kitchen under the Mitchell–Lama program.

[9][10] His French father, Marc Chalamet, is an editor for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and New York correspondent for Le Parisien.

[19] Growing up, Chalamet spent summers in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon,[20] a small French village two hours from Lyon, at the home of his paternal grandparents.

[33] After high school, Chalamet, then 17, attended Columbia University for a year, majoring in cultural anthropology, and was a resident of Hartley Hall.

[20][34][35][36] He later transferred to New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study to pursue his acting career more freely,[37] having found it difficult to assimilate to Columbia directly after filming Interstellar.

[40][41] As a child, Chalamet appeared in several commercials and acted in two horror short films called Sweet Tooth and Clown, before making his television debut on an episode of the long-running police procedural series Law & Order (2009), playing a murder victim.

The chief theatre critic of New York Daily News wrote: "Chalamet hilariously captures a tween's awakening curiosities about sex.

[47][48][49] A decade later, Chalamet stated that Interstellar was his favorite film he had ever been in, but shared that at the time he was disappointed because it didn't boost his career as he had assumed it would.

[51] In 2015, Chalamet co-starred in Andrew Droz Palermo's fantasy thriller One & Two, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it received mixed reviews, before its limited theatrical release.

[58][59][60][61] Chalamet also co-starred opposite Lily Rabe in Julia Hart's Miss Stevens as the troubled student Billy Mitman.

[64][65] The story revolves around Elio Perlman, a young man living in Italy during the 1980s, who falls in love with Oliver (Armie Hammer), a university student who has come to stay with his family.

[80][81][82] Later that year, he played Kyle Scheible, a rich hipster in a band and a love interest of Saoirse Ronan's character in Lady Bird, the solo directorial debut of Greta Gerwig.

[83] Critics praised the ensemble cast, with Ty Burr of The Boston Globe taking particular note of Chalamet's "hilarious" performance.

[84] In his final film of 2017, Scott Cooper's western Hostiles, Chalamet played a young soldier named Philippe DeJardin, alongside Christian Bale.

[86] Owen Glieberman of Variety drew comparisons with Chalamet's performance in Call Me by Your Name, stating that "Nic, in his muffled millennial James Dean way, [as] skittery and self-involved" is a transformation from the "marvelous directness" he displayed in the role of Elio Perlman.

[96][97] Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair wrote, "Chalamet does robust work, straightening his lanky posture as he goes, rising up into the role like a man ascendant".

[98] In his third film release of 2019, Chalamet portrayed Theodore "Laurie" Laurence, a lovestruck teenager, in Little Women, an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel of the same name.

Marking his second collaboration with Gerwig and Ronan,[99] the film was acclaimed by critics,[100] two of whom—Peter Travers of Rolling Stone and Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post—also praised Chalamet's performance; Travers noted that the actor portrays the role with "innate charm and poignant vulnerability", while Hornaday highlighted his "languidly graceful" performance and its "playful physicality".

[113] In his final role of the year, Chalamet played a skater punk in Adam McKay's Netflix ensemble comedy film Don't Look Up.

[124] He was King's only choice for the role, stating that he cast the actor without an audition after seeing his high school performances on YouTube that proved his singing and dancing skills.

[126] Slant Magazine's Derek Smith commended Chalamet for "imbuing Wonka [with] a warmth and tenderness that’s in perfect unison with the vibrant and bizarre world that King creates here".

[135][136] In his second project of the year, Chalamet produced and portrayed Bob Dylan in the biopic A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold.

[152][153] Remarking upon his performance in Beautiful Boy, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "he might be the male actor of his generation.

[160][161] The New York Times grouped Chalamet into a label it called "noodle boys", noted for their "sinewy" appearance and who served as an "alternative image of white masculinity" in American pop culture.

[167][168] Chalamet served as one of the co-chairs of the 2021 Met Gala, alongside singer Billie Eilish, professional tennis player Naomi Osaka and poet Amanda Gorman.

[171] They first met in Paris in 2017 at the request of Chalamet's agent Brian Swardstrom, who wanted Ackermann to style him for his first red carpet, at that year's Berlin International Film Festival.

[176][177] At the 94th Academy Awards, Chalamet wore a sequined Louis Vuitton jacket from Nicolas Ghesquière's womenswear collection without a shirt; W declared that he had "rewritten the gentleman's Oscar dress code for good," highlighting the boundary-pushing outfit that "blurred the lines of fashion's traditional gender divide.

[185] That same year, Chalamet worked with Cartier to create a costume necklace and collaborated with Nike on a pair of Dunk Lows; both items were influenced by his character of Willy Wonka.

[198] He enjoys hip-hop music[199] and considers rapper Kid Cudi to be his biggest career inspiration, alongside actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Joaquin Phoenix.