Timothée Chalamet came up for air this week to chat with Variety about his upcoming bowl cut in Netflix’s The King. The verdict? It stressed him out, but he’s over it now. For the record, I am not.
“At first it was anxiety-inducing, but then it was like nah this has to be done,” Chalamet told Variety at the film’s red carpet premiere on Tuesday. “Or else you can kind of see those period movies—without shading anybody—but where they didn’t fully, you know, you didn’t know what they were going for, and hopefully this is not that.”
What Chalamet means, of course, is that the bowl cut is Oscar bait, as my colleague Kelly Faircloth so cleverly deduced when we were introduced to it back in August. Without a bowl cut, Chalamet is a Hollywood boy with a perfect face, but with it, he is Henry V, a young medieval king in dire need of a new haircut. It’s these transformations that really pull you into the material.
“This is going for a new, searing portrait of a young man having no clue what circumstance he’s in with a skill set that is short of the circumstance he finds himself in,” he told Variety, likely alluding to his bowl cut’s bangs, which are definitely too short.