Timothée Chalamet has collaborated again with marty supreme director Josh Safdie, this time for a strange (and hilarious) feature in W Magazine, in which Chalamet once again takes on the role of a New York hustler with big dreams. But this time, those dreams don’t revolve around becoming a table tennis legend. They revolve around being a successful seller of modified game controllers.
Chalamet, from W magazine’s wonderfully strange alternate reality, is called Shend and resides in Brighton Beach, where he lives with his mother. He has a pet rabbit named Otter and a day job as a janitor. But at night he modifies the controllers, which he sells in the back of his car.
Honest gamer Chalamet has made money selling modified controllers in real life. Before becoming incomprehensibly famous, Chalamet had a YouTube account where he showed off his work under the name ModController360, which has since been deleted but preserved forever on the internet. Shend appears to be part fact, part fiction: a strange mix of Chalamet’s vision of ping pong god Marty Mauser and Chalamet himself.
"I always like to imagine alternative paths for Timmy,” Safdie told W of the unusual but charming collaboration. "Shend is inspired by a younger Timmy. A Timmy who had a YouTube channel where he tried to sell custom mod controllers. He saw money there.”
But modifying drivers is not the fictional Shend’s only hobby. He also likes to play. Yu-Gi-Oh! at your local card store.
"When I was a child, I really liked cards,” Chalamet explains in the article. "I remember being 12 or 13 and going to play Midtown Comics, and I loved how the game brought together all these different classes and races. For Josh [Safdie] And for me, one of the things we like about Shend is the whole spirit of New York, where you’re so worried about not fitting in anywhere that you then try to fit in everywhere.”
The W magazine article is filled with photos of Chalamet as Shend, sporting a short haircut and a blue Prada tracksuit. There are shots of him playing. Yu-Gi-Oh! at the card store, arguing with a potential customer on the phone and lying in his bed, petting Otter.
If, as you read this, you’re thinking, "I’d rather see this character in action,” well, Josh Safdie agrees with you. The fictional profile in W only features text and images, but Safdie says readers will one day be able to see Shend, who Chalamet says was invented over the course of "maybe two or three conversations,” on screen.
"What I love about this shoot is that it works as a character test,” Safdie said after the eight-hour shoot was over. "Now I know who this person is. Maybe now we can write a script about him.”
As for Shend’s strangely named pet rabbit, Otter, the marty supreme The director says it’s a representation of how he sees Chalamet: "Like a giant Angora rabbit.” In fact, Safdie showed Chalamet’s contact information to W magazine on his phone. Instead of Chalamet’s face, his contact photo is a portrait of a large Angora rabbit.
Chalamet will appear later this year in the conclusion to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune trilogy. Dune: part three. You can see it in IMAX.
Soruce: polygon.com