It's quite hard not to get a bit of an ego, if you're Timothée Chalamet. Turning in performance after performance that earns an Oscar nomination isn't a humbling experience, that's for sure, and whether you think the boasting is too much or not, it's clear the 30-year-old actor is putting his all into the movies he's making.
With Dune: Part Three being the last time he'll take on the role of Paul Muad'Dib Atreides, Chalamet wanted it to feel like something special. "What I think you see at the end of the second one, and across the third one, is yourself in Interstellar and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight and Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now and stuff like that," Chalamet told Matthew McConaughey in a recent town hall event in Texas (via Variety). "Actually, wait, let me rephrase all of that! Hold up. I cannot put myself in that same boat. Let's just say, it's these big movies where you could sneak in something. A curveball."
Compared to his first time filming Dune, where Chalamet was a bit overwhelmed by the scale of the sci-fi universe brought to life, he now feels as if he's much more attuned to such a role. "On the first Dune, we had an ornithopter sequence that I got a chance to do again in the third, but this time I was way more geared up," he described. "On Dune 3, as opposed to the first movie, I came out early and studied the control panel — all sorts of hieroglyphics and things that aren't tethered to reality. I wanted to know what each button did, and invent a dynamic for myself with it."</em
The reason Chalamet wants to be so locked in for this third Dune film? He doesn't want to let this opportunity pass him by, as it is the last time he'll be playing the role of Paul Atreides. <em>"I didn't want to be complacent about a single moment. Everything was sacred, and it was my last time doing a 'Dune' film, so I really wanted to treat it as sacred. Because people can get complacent, but I was more intense on the third one. It felt like that was the natural momentum, so I wanted to push against that as hard as I could," Chalamet said.