Timothee Chalamet Offered WONKA After Director Saw 'High School Musical Performances on YouTube'

According to an interview with Rolling Stone, WONKA director Paul KING says he offered Timothee Chalamet the part of a young Willy Wonka after seeing his high school musical performances on YouTube.

Chalamet attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, best known as the 'Fame School,' where he performed the roles of the Emcee in Cabaret and Oscar Lindquist in Sweet Charity.

“It was a straight offer because he’s great and he was the only person in my mind who could do it,” KING said. “But because he’s Timothée Chalamet and his life is so absurd, his high school musical performances are on YouTube and have hundreds of thousands of views. So I knew from stanning for Timmy Chalamet that he could sing and dance really well.”

Watch Chalamet perform "I'm The Bravest Individual" from his high school production of Sweet Charity here:

“I knew that was in his arsenal, but I didn’t know how good he was. When I spoke to him he was quite keen. He’d done tap dancing in high school and he was like, ‘I’d quite like to show people I can do that.’”

According to King, Wonka, which is set to be released in theatres on December 15th, will be “a really fun hat off to the golden age of MGM musicals."

Read the full interview here.

Based on the extraordinary character at the center of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl’s most iconic children’s book and one of the best-selling children’s books of all time, “Wonka” tells the wondrous story of how the world’s greatest inventor, magician and chocolate-maker became the beloved Willy Wonka we know today.

Timothee Chalamet began his career as a teenager in television productions, appearing in the drama series Homeland in 2012. In 2014 he made his film debut in the comedy-drama Men, Women & Children and appeared in Christopher Nolan's science fiction film Interstellar. 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. Alongside supporting roles in Greta Gerwig's films Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019), he took on starring roles as drug addict Nic Sheff in the biographical drama Beautiful Boy (2018), Paul Atreides in Denis Villeneuve's science fiction film Dune (2021), and a young cannibal in Guadagnino's romantic horror film Bones and All (2022), which he also produced.

Photo Credit: Walter McBride

 

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