It’s time for Timothée Chalamet to do a full heel turn.
The three-time Oscar nominee, not unlike his Marty Supreme character Marty Mauser, has an obligation to see a very specific thing through. And with that obligation, to further quote Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie’s script, comes sacrifice.
Before he was urging us all to dream big, Chalamet, who turned 30 in December, had already let the world in on his masterplan: He’s chasing a very specific kind of greatness, the kind that can place one in the company of indisputable masters of their craft like Michael Jordan and Daniel Day-Lewis. With Marty Supreme, many had predicted that Chalamet’s third time at the Oscars would indeed be the charm. Not only did this not come to pass, but the film, Safdie’s first solo joint since 2008’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed, ultimately went 0-for-9.
Some will illogically blame the losses on Chalamet’s wholly innocuous ballet and opera remarks, the response to which—and there’s really no other way to put it—felt like some sort of mass psychosis event. Others will point the proverbial finger at the actor’s sheer pop cultural omnipresence.
As soon as Sunday’s Oscars ceremony wrapped, there were plenty of takes making the rounds on X theorizing that Chalamet’s team must surely be scrambling, a misguided assumption that conveniently ignores both Marty Supreme’s status as the highest-grossing movie in A24’s catalog and the forthcoming launch of the third entry in the hugely successful Dune franchise.
Put another way, these people are wrong. The Dune of it all, in fact, is where all of this starts to get really interesting. Dune: Part Three, helmed by returning director Denis Villeneuve and expected to pull from the late Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah novel, will—depending on what carries over from the source material, of course—almost certainly lay bare the multi-pronged consequences of Paul Atreides’s complicated journey.
The character, widely interpreted as neither an outright hero nor a full-fledged villain, may very well die in the third film, which only adds to the urgency and potential free-for-all approach Chalamet and company could (should!) take in the months leading up to its release.
During the extensive Marty Supreme rollout, Chalamet seemed to publicly embody aspects of his Marty Mauser character in the public eye, even as far back as his SAG Awards acceptance speech in February 2025. At the time, the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts alum was still a full 10 months away from bringing Marty and company to theaters.
Now, imagine a press tour during which Chalamet leans all the way into his own self-curated messiah-made-villain arc in the public eye for Dune: Part Three. Given his past dalliances with performance art-informed movie promo, particularly during the A Complete Unknown and Marty Supreme rollouts, this doesn’t feel like a massive stretch.
To be clear, I’m talking full, professional wrestling-level heel. If someone asks him a dumb question about those ballet and opera remarks, villain-arc TC would decline to go the expected route of extinguishing the situation. Instead, he’d fan the flames by enthusiastically doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down.
Villain-era TC would employ a similar strategy whenever someone bristled at his aspirational proclamations of being on the path toward undeniable greatness, as some did in response to his “one of the greats” speech at the 2025 SAG Awards.
“I know we’re in a subjective business but the truth is I’m really in pursuit of greatness,” he said at the time. “I know people don’t usually talk like that but I wanna be one of the greats.”
Dune: Part Three is in theaters on Dec. 16, meaning it will be going head to head at the box office with Avengers: Doomsday.
Time to turn up the heat, Big Tim.