“Where are you?” a girl at Washington Square Park yelled into her phone. “I said, Where are you? Get your ass over here. The Timothées are here!”
On a very sunny Sunday afternoon, just off the NYU campus where Timothée Chalamet was once enrolled, a few hundred people gathered under the Washington Square Arch waiting for people who looked like Chalamet to arrive and compete against one another. In the hour that led up to the event, questions and confusion abounded: What was the competition going to entail? Who organized this thing? Who was judging? Would Chalamet himself make an appearance?
Anticipation for the event began several weeks prior. In mid-September, signs started to pop up around Soho and the West Village announcing a “Timothee [sic] Chalamet Lookalike Competition” with a $50 cash prize. Everything about the ad, from its QR code linking to a Partiful page that listed some 2,500 attendees (and 600-something maybes) to its unfussy formatting replete with a squished image of Chalamet himself, suggested this was a real “only in New York” type of event, the ideally stupid get-together that might, perhaps, offset the city’s otherwise bad vibe as Donald Trump rolled into town two miles north for his Madison Square Garden rally. “I have to head to that in 30 minutes,” one of the trade photographers said to another. “So let me know who wins.”
More than there were Chalamets present — and, seemingly, more than there were people eager to meet someone who might look like Timothée — there were content creators. Selfie sticks, iPhone tripods, baby microphones as far as the eye could see. Being humbly five-two myself, every time I thrust my camera in the air to take a photo of the action, I mostly found myself taking photos of other people taking photos. Wasn’t anyone there to see who looked the most like the boy king in appearance, voice, and overall energy? Or were we all just there to post through it?
In this sea of creators, the Chalamets thrived, eager to have their photos taken, speak into iPhones, shake hands, and even flirt with one another. The look-alikes adopted various aesthetic strategies. For Spencer DeLorenzo, a 22-year-old who works in film, his getting-into-character process required “a rinse that makes your hair darker” and an “8:30 a.m. salon appointment” that morning to get those signature Chalamet curls. DeLorenzo had all the nervous charm of Chalamet on the red carpet — glancing away, laughing a little. “Fifty dollars is probably going to my dinner tonight,” he said of the prize money. “Maybe if I meet a ravishing young woman, she can come along.”
Vincent Panetta, an 18-year-old from Vermont, rocked up dressed as Bob Dylan, a hat tip to Chalamet’s forthcoming A Complete Unknown. “I’d been compared to Bob Dylan by several people, so I felt like the best way to go for it was like that.” For Cramer Ekholm, an 18-year-old from Wisconsin, the approach was a bit of streetwear Chalamet and Dune Chalamet as he arrived in a black robe and white T-shirt. Ekholm also carried a MCoBeauty bag: His appearance was sponsored by the cosmetics company — its cream bronzer put to good use to approximate Chalamet’s jawline.
A number of people, however, were ultimately not impressed with the resemblances. “Just because you have curly hair doesn’t mean you look like Timothée Chalamet,” said Ariana, a 24-year-old who came out for the event. “I have curly hair. I should enter. What’s stopping me if some of these people are entering?” Few could agree on what the metric for a successful Chalamet look-alike: “It’s not just the hair,” I heard one woman say to another. “He’s not hot because he’s hot. He’s hot because he’s unattainable.”
Right after one in the afternoon, the event’s organizer appeared in a top hat and suit. This was not, as the Partiful suggested, a random guy named Gilbert; this was YouTuber Anthony Po, the whole event yet another one of Po’s longform, high-effort bits, like when he went around as “Cheeseball Man.” It was clear from the second Po arrived — shouting out to shoving crowds through a bullhorn as the cops descended on the gathering and the real Chalamet came and went — that the event would have all the organizational coherence of a stunt planned by a YouTuber. After the police came to speak to Po (and apparently issue a fine for lack of crowd control), he led everyone, Chalamets and all, through the NYU campus and finally landed at Mercer Playground, where the judging took place.
Po subjected the Chalamets in competition to a series of qualifying rounds: First, the Chalamets stood front and center in the playground, where people would either cheer or boo them. Then the contestants took questions Miss America style (about being French, about Kylie Jenner), after which women came up to, I don’t know, inspect them. By this point, the bullhorn had gone dead, the sounds of the event lost amid the chitchatting of attendees. “I feel like we should get bagels soon,” said the person behind me as another woman came up to inspect the Chalamets.
There was a final round of booing and cheering, the most enthusiastic applause given to Miles Mitchell, who dressed as Willy Wonka, and Zander Dueve, who dressed as Paul Atreides. Was it really a Chalamet look-alike competition if the most Chalamet-like Chalamets were Chalamet characters? “One of the requirements should be that you have to be born here to compete,” said a woman behind me. “That’s like half the deal with him.” That the men in costume wound up being the finalists suggested, if anything, a relative unknowable quality to Chalamet. None of us really understand what a heartthrob is like, not even those who brushed shoulders with him in Washington Square Park.
Mitchell’s Wonka Chalamet ultimately took home the prize — a giant check for fifty dollars, the likes of which will likely be dwarfed by whatever Po makes off the ad sales on his eventual video. Mitchell didn’t seem to mind. The winning Wonka threw candy out into the crowd, pools of fans descending on the group of losing Chalamet look-alikes hoping, maybe, they had $50 on them already and might want to go to dinner. A guy at least two heads taller than me craned his neck to get a good glimpse at the winner. “He’s just in a Wonka costume. He doesn’t even really look like Timothée Chalamet,” the man said. A woman in front of him whipped around. “So what?” she snapped. “You think you do?”
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