Timothée Chalamet once discussed his surprise and slight disappointment over his limited screen time in the film *Interstellar*. Directed by Christopher Nolan, the 2014 movie featured Chalamet as Tom, the son of Matthew McConaughey’s character. In the years since, Chalamet’s career has flourished with leading roles in films such as *Marty Supreme*, *Wonka*, *Dune*, and *A Complete Unknown*. However, his earlier roles were not always as prominent.
Upon securing the role of Tom, Chalamet conducted an online search and discovered that the film was initially about a father-son relationship. This led him to believe he had achieved a significant milestone in his acting career.
During a Los Angeles screening of *Interstellar* on February 9, Chalamet recounted: “This was a script [Nolan’s brother Jonathan] wrote for Steven Spielberg. When I got the part, I Googled the project. The original story was about a father and his son, so I thought, ‘Oh man, I made it!’ And then obviously they reworked it and young Tom was a smaller part, but that’s OK.”
Nolan, present with Chalamet during these comments, humorously advised the actor, “Never believe what you read online!” (via Variety).
In their conversation, they also discussed the emotional scenes where Cooper, played by McConaughey, views videos of his children growing up. Some of these scenes included Chalamet, but Nolan revealed that he had to trim certain parts due to a creative disagreement.
“When you were filming the messages from home, there was a particular thing where you were hitting a dark tone,” Nolan explained. “It felt too much for me. I didn’t particularly like it. I told you about it and you went ahead and did whatever the f**k you wanted and carried on. But I was like, ‘He knows what he wants to do and has an idea.'”
Continuing, Nolan said: “It wasn’t about being stubborn. You had planned what you wanted to do. You planned your choices and you didn’t want to abandon that on a casual whim for me. You wanted to test that and challenge that and see if I kept coming back, which I didn’t. I’ll find a logic to that in the edit suite.” Chalamet humorously added, “And then you cut to Casey Affleck,” with a laugh.
Though Chalamet can now laugh about the situation, he once revealed that he cried after seeing *Interstellar* because he realized his role had been reduced. Reflecting on working with renowned actors like McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Jessica Chastain, Chalamet expressed feeling like a ‘fraud’ due to his early career stage.
In a 2018 ‘Actors on Actors’ interview with Emma Stone, he recalled: “I saw *[Interstellar]* and loved it, but then I went home with my dad and wept for an hour because I just figured my part was bigger or something.”