EW, who released a new still from ‘Beautiful Boy’ just a few days ago, now also have a short new interview up with Timmy talking about the challenges of playing Nic Sheff. You can read the interview at the link above and a few choice excerpts here.
Rather than provide a neat arc toward recovery — as Hollywood has tended to do — Boy is propelled by relapses, estrangements, death scares, and the increasingly difficult decisions Nic’s family needs to make for his care.
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Chalamet concedes that the atmosphere on set was “intense” given the material, but he also describes it as “dutiful.” “[It was] more a devotion to getting this story right,” he explains. “With high emotional family stakes at play, you feel a responsibility to the actual story…. We tried to capture someone in the throes of addiction, caught between, addled.”
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The difference in years of experience between them wasn’t lost on Chalamet, who describes Carell’s work as “always honest and real.” He gushes, particularly, about the “moment to moment consistency” of Carell’s performance, from which he realized the importance of “letting things come to you in scenes, and not the other way around.” Yet Chalamet had a larger takeaway from observing his screen partner. “It was also the way [Steve] carried himself on set,” he explains. “He has this kind of incredible combination of humanity and professionalism, it makes you want to be around him and work with him.”
