Timothee Chalamet didn't have to audition for the role of Willy Wonka in the film because...

Not Donald Glover or Ezra Miller or Ryan Gosling but Timothee Chalamet was always the choice for Warner Bros' Willy Wonka. In fact, Paul King’s prequel musical Wonka always had Timothee in mind while casting. Interestingly, the actordidn’t even have to audition for the part. Paul said that he was a Chalamet “stan” and knew that the actor could do justice to all the singing and dancing needed to play Wonka.

Paul King said, “It was a straight offer because he’s great and he was the only person in my mind who could do it. But because he’s Timothée Chalamet and his life is so absurd, his high school musical performances are on YouTube and have hundreds of thousands of views. So I knew from stanning for Timmy Chalamet that he could sing and dance really well.”

King continued, “I knew that was in his arsenal, but I didn’t know how good he was. When I spoke to him he was quite keen. He’d done tap dancing in high school and he was like, ‘I’d quite like to show people I can do that.’”

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What to watch out for in Wonka

The film, Wonka, is a musical that feels like “a really fun hat off to the golden age of MGM musicals,” King said of the project. Previously, the director has worked on Paddington movies, but he said Wonka has a much different tone.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, the director said, “Certainly, I tried to have darker characters than [what] you would find in a Paddingtonmovie, for example. It’s a crueller world and it’s a meaner world that Willy Wonka finds himself in because that’s the sort of city that Charlie grows up in. Unlike the Paddingtonworld, not everyone is nice in a Roald Dahl world. I definitely got to play with those grotesque ideas, but I hope not to damage a generation of children.”

Wonka will release on December 15, 2023.

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