CULTURE

Timothée Chalamet Did a Bit of Light Reading During the SAG Awards

The young actor becomes a meme for the second time this month.

Jan. 28, 2019

Photograph by Tim Walker; Styled by Sara Moonves.

As Megan Mullally launched into her opening monologue during Sunday night’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, John Krasinski and Emily Blunt sat in the audience, enraptured. Their blissful expressions, captured by the cameras during the show broadcast, radiate peace and tenderness; they’re surrounded by a sea of similarly smiling faces. Such a nice moment.

Except, wait, there, two seats down from the happy couple, is Timothée Chalamet, engrossed in … something else. The 23-year-old actor became a meme for the second time this month—post-Golden Globes harness (excuse us, bib)—when he was spotted in the first minutes of the SAG Awards, apparently perusing the show’s program very attentively. “What’s Timothée Chalamet reading?” Entertainment Weekly tweeted out, joining the chorus of speculative Twitter users. (Per Us Weekly, it was really just the program for the awards ceremony. Maybe he didn’t know who Megan Mullally was. Maybe he just wanted to know what was coming up next. Maybe he wanted to check they’d spelled his name correctly.)

At one point, Mullally quipped that Blunt, who was nominated for (and eventually won) the award for best supporting actress for A Quiet Place, which Krasinski directed, didn’t actually have to learn any lines for her role. (The movie is very, very quiet, and there’s very little dialogue, it’s true.) That’s when the cameras descended on the Blunt-Krasinski-Chalamet table, capturing him mid-sentence; after a moment, he realized he was in the frame, and he looked up and laughed, per Us Weekly’s recap. The kid had a long night ahead, and who can blame him for checking how much show was left before the best supporting actor award? He was nominated in the same field as Mahershala Ali and Adam Driver, after all, so it’d be perfectly fair for him to be a little antsy about the whole thing.

And anyways, who among us has not? In middle school, I tried to read the sixth Harry Potter book in a day, just to say I could; in order to do so, I carried it between classes, pulling it out—I thought surreptitiously; my teachers thought less so—under my desk to chip away at its 700-odd pages. It’s fine, Timothée Chalamet is fine.