Timothée Chalamet on French-Guy Hair, Filming With Scorsese, and Being the New Face of Bleu de Chanel

Timothée Chalamet rarely gets grilled about his beauty routine. Still, there’s really no escaping the question of his exquisitely disheveled hair. When we meet on a drizzly spring morning in New York, he’s ensconced in a squishy black leather armchair and dressed in all black—Nike tee, workwear pants, Craig Green sneakers—and his gently mussed, side-parted curls are undeniably the main event. “You’re actually the first person to ask me about my hair. What’s the secret?” he repeats, bemused by my opener. “There really isn’t one. When I wake up, it’s a roll of the dice,” says Chamalet, preempting my next question: “And I get my hair from my dad.”

If Chalamet has his French father to thank for his laissez-faire curls, then he owes his nose for fragrance to his American grandmother. “I remember her giving my sister Chanel No. 5—I think it was for my sister’s birthday—and she had this little Chanel purse too,” he says of his late grandmother, who lived in the same Hell’s Kitchen apartment building Chalamet grew up in. “She was a very, very elegant lady in the best sense of the word—subtly elegant and not for show.” 

She would have no doubt appreciated the scent he’s wearing today: Bleu de Chanel. “I like that it feels a little pulled back, it’s subtle but still assertive,” he says, raising his wrist to his face to take in the aromatic notes of sandalwood. “I’m not someone who wears scent all the time. For me, it’s about emphasizing a moment.” 

This afternoon, the 27-year-old actor will have his first big moment as the new face of Chanel’s men’s fragrance. Though the atmosphere in this photo studio in Midtown is relatively subdued, the frenzy around the campaign is already bubbling over. Later in the week, paparazzi pictures of Chalamet filming the Martin Scorsese–directed fragrance spot will be all over the tabloids. Not since Baz Luhrmann shot Nicole Kidman for Chanel No. 5 in 2004 has a campaign been as highly anticipated. Like Kidman before him, Chalamet is that rare talent who is capable of setting both Hollywood and the fashion world on fire. Plus he’s one of a handful of guys to be anointed by Chanel.