Chalamet began his career as a teenager in television, appearing in the drama series Homeland in Chalamet came to international attention with the lead role of a lovestruck teenager in Luca Guadagnino 's coming-of-age film Call Me by Your Name , earning him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. For his portrayal of Bob Dylan in the biographical drama A Complete Unknown , which he also produced, he was nominated for his second Academy Award for Best Actor.
Offscreen, he has been labeled as a sex symbol and a fashion icon. Chalamet is bilingual in English and French , [ b ] [ 18 ] and holds dual United States and French citizenship due to his French father. Washington Middle School, which he described as miserable due to the lack of a creative outlet within the school's academically rigorous environment.
His acceptance into the school was a turning point in his appreciation for acting. After high school, Chalamet, then 17, attended Columbia University for a year, majoring in cultural anthropology , and was a resident of Hartley Hall. In , Chalamet made his stage debut in the Off-Broadway play The Talls , a coming-of-age comedy set in the s, in which he played a sexually curious year-old.
The chief theatre critic of New York Daily News wrote: "Chalamet hilariously captures a tween's awakening curiosities about sex. Handpicked by its playwright and director John Patrick Shanley and producer Scott Rudin , Chalamet portrayed a younger Shanley, a misfit Bronx kid in a prestigious New Hampshire prep school set in Stephen Farber of The Hollywood Reporter described Chalamet's act as "compelling" and "startling", with his character's speech from Death of a Salesman as among the best he has ever seen.
In preparation, Chalamet learned to speak Italian, as well as to play the piano and guitar. He alone would make the film worth watching". In his second film of , Chalamet played Daniel, a gawky teenager who gets swept up in the drug-dealing business over the course of a summer, in Elijah Bynum's directorial debut, Hot Summer Nights.
