5 Most Underrated Timothée Chalamet Movies

There are actors who seem to be in every other movie and it begins to feel like too much. Then there is someone like Timothée Chalamet, who seems to be in every other movie but nobody minds one bit. It helps that he's not only immensely talented, but tends to be picky about his projects and almost never attaches his name to a creative misfire. Chalamet has only been making movies since 2014, but he's already amassed an impressive resume that includes both highly lauded films and massive commercial hits.

He's also been making history already, as he did in March 2024 when Chalamet broke John Travolta's 45-year box office record of having two top-grossing films come out in the span of just a few months. While there aren't too many downsides to having "Interstellar," "Call Me By Your Name," "Lady Bird," "Little Women," "Wonka," "A Complete Unknown," "Dune," and "Dune: Part Two" all part of your first decade as an actor, it can mean that anything other than an absolute critical darling and/or box office juggernaut gets lost in the shuffle.

To that end, Chalamet is already building up a repertoire of overlooked gems to accompany his big hits — and it's as good a time as any to check some of those out, before he makes another dozen or so can't-miss films that make it that much harder to catch up on the ones that flew under the radar.

It seems like every actor who wants to be taken seriously has to eventually do a big historical epic. But that doesn't seem to be why Timothée Chalamet was drawn to Netflix's "The King," based on the works of William Shakespeare and telling the story of England's King Henry V (Chalamet), who takes the crown after the death of King Henry IV (Ben Mendelsohn). To hear Chalamet tell it, he just wants to make good stuff — and he saw that in "The King."

And good stuff "The King" is, with a 71% Rotten Tomatoes score that reads, "While 'The King' is sometimes less than the sum of its impressive parts, strong source material and gripping performances make this a period drama worth hailing." In addition to a dynamite lead performance from Chalamet and the work of the ever-reliable Mendelsohn, Robert Pattinson, Joel Edgerton, and Lily-Rose Depp are just a few of the talented names who deliver those gripping performances the critics were raving about.

And if you're the type to be scared off by how long these types of movies typically are, "The King" comes in at a modest-for-its-genre 140 minutes — which is especially not bad for Netflix, which has a history of letting filmmakers run wild with movie lengths.

The year before "Call Me By Your Name" announced Timothée Chalamet as one of Hollywood's brightest new talents — earning him his first Oscar nomination in the process — the actor had already crept onto critics' radars with the acclaimed 2016 dramedy "Miss Stevens." The titular teacher, played by Lily Rabe, chaperones three of her students to a drama competition. Chalamet plays one of those students, who has to figure out how to keep his behavioral disorder from not only getting in the way of his talent but also his relationships.

"Miss Stevens" is as much about the journey to the competition as the destination, spending a good chunk of its runtime being a hybrid road comedy and coming-of-age film. It was in many ways more of a showcase for the often underrated Rabe, who very much deserved to win the special jury award for best actress at the South by Southwest festival. But it's still an ensemble piece that required an equally talented group of young actors to play the students, and Chalamet shined in that duty alongside Lili Reinhart and Antony "Lohanthony" Quintal.

An underrated Timothée Chalamet drama you can find on Amazon, which distributed the 2018 film, is "Beautiful Boy." Also featuring one of Steve Carell's more overlooked roles, especially among his dramas, "Beautiful Boy" stars Carrell and Chalamet as real-life father and son writers David Sheff and Nic Sheff, respectively. The movie is based on two different memoirs — one each by David and Nic — that tell the story of how David helped Nic overcome addiction in order to not only realize Nic's talents but also save his life. 

The Rotten Tomatoes critical consensus calls Chalamet and Carell's performances  "showcase work," saying that the actors' accomplishments help elevate what would have only been a pretty good movie into a great one. Chalamet racked up numerous nominations for his performance in "Beautiful Boy," including a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and a Critics Choice Award.

Although it's a genre that is pretty much as old as movies themselves, and rarely disappears from big screens for any significant length of time, Westerns are sometimes a tough sell with audiences. That was the case with 2018's "Hostiles," which flopped at the box office despite good reviews and the considerable star power of Christian Bale as the lead. Bale plays Captain Joseph J. Blocker, who is forced to escort dying Cheyenne chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) back to Montana in spite of the two having fought against each other in battle. 

Timothée Chalamet plays Private Philippe Dejardin, one of the group of soldiers commissioned to be part of the Yellow Hawk escort mission. In fact, Dejardin is the youngest soldier in the squad, and his inexperience doesn't do him any favors on this unconventional and treacherous assignment. 

Chalamet gets lost in the shuffle a bit here, not only due to Bale's powerhouse performance but also behind an impressive ensemble that includes scene stealers like Jesse Plemons, Rosamund Pike, Rory Cochrane, and Scott Wilson. But one of Chalamet's great talents is that he's equally adept at just being a strong supporting player as he is at leading a film, and "Hostiles" is a great showcase for the former. 

The 2020s got especially busy for Timothée Chalamet, with the actor appearing in a whopping eight movies between 2021 and 2024 alone. And given that those eight movies include the two installments of "Dune," "Wonka," "A Complete Unknown," and the buzzy Adam McKay apocalypse comedy "Don't Look Up," it's easy to see why the excellent "Bones and All" got overlooked despite it being Chalamet's only 2022 release.

With the actor also putting on his producer hat for the first time with this film, "Bones and All" is an inventive romance-horror movie hybrid that has its two leads — Chalamet and Taylor Russell — also be cannibals. It's obviously not going to be for everyone, and no shame if it's the type of subject matter you can't stomach, no pun intended. But if you can, you'll find not only one of Chalamet's most daring performances in "Bones and All," but proof that the actor isn't afraid to still make dark and challenging projects even as he enters the upper echelons of big studio movie paychecks.