We Néed Timmy’s É

He’s the Beyoncé of his generation of actors, name-wise. Illustration: Stevie Remsberg

Not everyone gets a movie-star name. Marilyn Monroe, famously Norma Jean. Eric Bishop was not going to win Jamie Foxx an Oscar. It’s one of those underacknowledged privileges the Hollywood elite get to divvy up amongst themselves. Some people are industry plants, some people get rags-to-riches stories, and some people have names like Timothée Chalamet. That name (not the man, let me be clear) makes him the Beyoncé of this generation of actors, two people whose parents supplied them with one of their earliest keys to future success: a sexy little accent mark.

Chalamet is far from the lone waifish white boy to not only grace screens in recent years, but to find himself among ranks of A-listers. They have to learn how to stand out or get lost in the background of a World War II drama. Lucas Hedges has an affinity for queer roles, Jacob Elordi is six-foot-five, and Timothée Chalamet is a name meant to appear first-billing. As @uncoolboyfriend succinctly puts it, “if timothée chalamet’s name was timothy he wouldn’t have a career.” Timothy Chalamet is a field mouse who lives in an oversize mushroom, but Timothée Chalamet plays him in the Wes Anderson movie adaptation of his life. His name is melodic; ask Tyler, the Creator — who shouts out “Tim ChalameT” on 2018’s “OKRA” — or all the tweets calling him “Timotay Chardonnay.” Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch set it to verse in 2022: “Higgledy piggledy / Timothée Chalamet / Has a name meriting / Endless design,” she responded to a tweet calling him “symphony cabernet.” “Much like his forerunner / Benedict Cumberbatch: / Hexasyllabically, Easy to rhyme.”

And yet, everyone, from fans to haters, just wants to call him Timmy, the inoffensively juvenile nickname he grew up with. “My whole life I was Timmy and then as I got older, it seemed like Timmy was youthing me out, so it’s been Timothée since,” he told Christopher Edwin Breaux in a 2021 V Man interview. “I tried Timo and Tim, too. The real pronunciation is Timo-tay, but I can’t ask people to call me that; it just seems really pretentious.”

But I’m glad he’s committed to it. I, too, have a name with an accented e, except officially, due to government naming conventions, and even on my byline for most of my career due to coding law, my name will never reflect who I am. The state of California thinks I’m someone I’m not. When I get on flights, I have to assume a new identity. Instead of Zoë, the way I’ve been writing my name since I showed up at kindergarten, I’m supposed to be “Zoe.” As easy as it is to ignore a couple smudges on a page, even as someone who claims them, there are no excuses for getting names wrong. Timothée’s insistence continues to raise awareness for how to add accents on keyboards (just hold the vowel down if you’re on a Mac, Google it on Windows). Everyone deserves to be called by their own name.