W MAGAZINE – When Timothée Chalamet talks about his challenging upbringing in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, or the behavioral issues that plagued him as a teenager, or his struggles with how to approach this whole acting thing, he would like you to understand that he is not doing so from inside a bubble. He knows that there are people out there with far worse problems, so please don’t judge him, okay?

“These are first-world problems to the max. Seriously, I don’t want anyone reading this to think, ‘Woe is me,’” says the excitable 20-year old actor. Over 45 minutes in a booth at the Cozy Soup ‘N’ Burg, in Soho, he repeated multiple variations on this phrase. “In these kind of interviews—and this isn’t a woe-is-me kind of thing, these are just observations—for whatever reason that I’m supposed to be wide-eyed, very thankful, excited. You hear that word a lot, excited—exciting, fresh-faced kid. And that part of me really exists… but, well, there are other shades of me.”

Okay, perhaps we start over. So Timothée Chalamet, an attractive 20 year-old actor who would never want to be pigeonholed as wide-eyed, is seated in the corner booth of a Soho diner, stealthily decimating a bowl of matzo ball soup. He is here to talk about his role in Prodigal Son, a new play written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, which opens in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at City Center—Stage 1 on Tuesday, February 9th.
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