Top 10 Timothee Chalamet Movies, Ranked

There’s a specific kind of actor who makes you forget you’re watching a performance, and Timothee Chalamet has been that actor since before most people knew his name. He doesn’t hide behind technique or lean on charm as a crutch. He just shows up, fully present, and something real happens on screen. Here at TV Hulk, we ranked these films by how completely he disappears into each role: how convincing the emotion feels, how specific the physical choices are, and how long the performance sticks with you after the credits roll. From a scene-stealing high school poser to a messianic sci-fi icon, these are his ten best.

10. Miss Stevens (2016)

Billy Mitman is the kind of troubled teenager who could easily tip into melodrama, but Chalamet plays him with a rawness that feels completely unguarded. There’s a scene where Billy breaks down mid-rehearsal during a school drama trip, and the way Chalamet lets the emotion crack through without telegraphing it is striking for an actor this early in his career. The film itself is small and quiet, a low-budget indie that barely registered at the time, but critics who caught it pointed to this performance as proof that something special was coming. Billy’s volatility never feels performed, and that restraint is exactly what makes the role work.

9. Lady Bird (2017)

Kyle Scheible is a supporting player in Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age gem, but Chalamet makes him unforgettable in the most specific way possible: by playing the pretension absolutely straight. Kyle strums his guitar, drops half-formed political opinions, and treats sincerity like it’s beneath him, and Chalamet nails every beat of that self-satisfied posturing without winking at the audience. The moment Lady Bird catches him in a lie and he barely flinches, too cool to even bother defending himself, lands as both funny and a little devastating. It’s a sharp, well-timed comic turn that showed his breakout year had more than one gear.

8. Bones and All (2022)

Lee doesn’t announce himself. He drifts into the frame of Luca Guadagnino’s cannibal road-trip romance with a quiet, coiled energy that keeps you slightly off-balance for the entire film. Chalamet plays him as someone who has learned to hold very still around other people, and that physical restraint makes the moments when Lee finally lets his guard down feel genuinely earned. The scene where he and Maren share a meal in an abandoned house, laughing like normal teenagers for just a few minutes, is heartbreaking precisely because of how hard he’s worked to keep that softness buried. It’s a cult film that rewards patience, and his performance is a big reason why.

7. Little Women (2019)

Laurie Laurence is the romantic lead who doesn’t get the girl, and Chalamet plays that particular ache with more grace than the role probably required. His chemistry with Saoirse Ronan is immediate and easy, the kind of screen rapport that looks effortless but clearly isn’t. What lingers, though, is the rejection scene: the moment Jo turns him down, and you watch Laurie’s whole self-image quietly collapse. Chalamet doesn’t play it with anger or dramatic tears; he plays it with a stunned, almost childlike hurt that hits harder than a bigger reaction would have. In an ensemble full of strong performances, his carries more emotional weight than its screen time suggests.

6. Beautiful Boy (2018)

Nic Sheff’s addiction is the kind of role that could become a reel of suffering if handled carelessly, but Chalamet finds the specific, human details that keep it from tipping into misery porn. Watch the scenes where Nic is charming, funny, and completely present, then watch how quickly that warmth drains away when the craving takes over. The whiplash between those two states is where the performance lives, and it’s hard to sit with in the best possible way. His work here landed him supporting nominations from the Golden Globes, SAG Awards, and BAFTA simultaneously, all in the same year his career was just getting started. The film asks a lot of him, and he doesn’t flinch once.

5. Marty Supreme (2025)

Josh Safdie gave Chalamet one of his most physically demanding and behaviorally strange roles in Marty Mauser, a competitive ping-pong obsessive whose intensity borders on unsettling. Chalamet commits to the eccentricity completely, finding a rhythm in Marty’s single-minded focus that makes him fascinating to watch even when he’s being a deeply difficult person to be around. The championship match in the third act, where Marty silently mouths counts between serves while his girlfriend watches from the bleachers looking utterly lost to him, captures exactly how far gone he is, and Chalamet brings that same coiled tension to the quieter scenes where Marty’s relationships fray around him. He didn’t soften anything about this character, and the performance is stronger for it.

4. Wonka (2023)

Nobody had Timothee Chalamet as a song-and-dance man on their bingo card, which is part of what makes this performance so disarming. He plays a young Willy Wonka with a physical lightness that feels almost weightless, moving through the film’s elaborate set pieces like someone who believes, with his whole chest, that the world is full of possibility. The opening number, where Wonka arrives in a new city with nothing but a hat and a recipe, sets the tone immediately: this is a performance built on warmth and momentum rather than nostalgia or imitation. The film grossed over $630 million worldwide, and a significant part of that is the audience’s willingness to follow wherever Chalamet takes them.

3. Dune Franchise (2021–2024)

Paul Atreides is one of science fiction’s trickiest protagonists, a chosen-one figure whose arc is specifically designed to interrogate the myth of the chosen one, and Chalamet walks that line across both films with real precision. In the first Dune, he plays Paul’s uncertainty as something almost physical, a young man who keeps bracing for a destiny he’s not sure he wants. By Dune: Part Two, that hesitation has curdled into something harder and more frightening. The scene where Paul drinks the Water of Life and emerges changed is deeply unsettling in a way the franchise needed to earn. Together, the two films crossed a billion dollars worldwide, and his transformation across them is the throughline that holds everything together.

2. A Complete Unknown (2024)

Playing Bob Dylan is a trap. The voice, the mannerisms, the mythology: every element invites imitation, and imitation is death for a performance like this. Chalamet sidesteps it by finding something restless and unresolved in the young Dylan, a person who is still figuring out what he’s building even as the world starts treating him like a monument. The scene where Dylan goes electric at Newport, standing at the microphone while the crowd turns on him, captures that tension perfectly: Chalamet plays it not as triumph or defiance but as someone who simply cannot be anything other than what he is. An Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and a Golden Globe win for Best Actor in a Drama followed, and honestly neither came as a surprise.

1. Call Me by Your Name (2017)

Elio Perlman is the role that made the world stop. Chalamet was 21 when Luca Guadagnino’s film premiered, and what he does with Elio’s summer of longing is so achingly specific it still doesn’t feel like acting in any conventional sense. The peach scene is the one everyone talks about, and for good reason: he plays it with a physical vulnerability that feels like you’re intruding on something private. But the performance is full of smaller moments just as precise, the way Elio listens to music with his whole body, the way he translates feelings into irritability because he doesn’t have any other language for them yet. His Oscar nomination made him one of the youngest Best Actor nominees in Academy history, a milestone that felt less like a surprise than a confirmation of what audiences had already sensed watching that film.

What’s striking about Chalamet’s body of work, looking at it all together, is how consistently he chooses emotional exposure over protection. Most actors at his level start building walls around themselves as their profiles rise. He keeps doing the opposite, and the performances are better for it.