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Credit: Warner Bros.
A character’s hair can really inform how an actor plays a role, and we’ve seen plenty of drastic measures taken — like Tom Felton dyeing his hair every nine days to achieve Draco Malfoy’s platinum blond in the Harry Potter movies or Matt Smith’s wild mohawk in Caught Stealing. Just because it’s important doesn’t always mean the actor is happy about it, as Timothée Chalamet proved with his reaction to having to cut his hair for Dune: Part Three.
Timothée Chalamet boasts gorgeous curly brown hair, and while he has no secret for how to achieve its perfect volume, he seems pretty attached to it. In fact, when he visited The Graham Norton Show recently to promote Marty Supreme — his latest project on the 2025 movie calendar — he didn’t try to hide how bitter he was over having to sport a buzzcut for the next installment of the Dune franchise. The host asked him what happened to “the beautiful Chalamet locks,” and the actor replied:
They’re all gone. They’ve been stolen.
Wow, strong choice of words! Graham Norton pressed on: How long has he been without his signature curls?
I can just see Timothée Chalamet pulling out the chalk to mark one more day since Denis Villeneuve asked the Dune hairstylists to bring out the razor. If this man remembers the date of his buzzcut, he is not over it. That was already pretty obvious by his assertion that his locks had been “stolen,” and all I can say is it’s a good thing for Villeneuve that hair grows back.
Timothée Chalamet seemed to understand the reason for going so short, but that didn’t stop him from asking Denis Villeneuve to reconsider. He said:
It was for Dune: Part Three. It’s supposed to be a nice character shift, and I’m playing 15, 20 years older. So we did a 3-millimeter haircut, and then the director wanted more, 1.5, then we did 1, and I begged him. I said, ‘Please, please.’ Your hair, weirdly, we’re all attached. It’s like your personality, these follicles that grow out of our heads.
I understand the Oscar nominee’s sentiment here. Our hair definitely can have an effect on our self-confidence, and especially with Timothée Chalamet changing his hair to fit whatever character he’s playing — from Yule’s mullet in Don’t Look Up to Bob Dylan’s coif in A Complete Unknown (which was not actually a wig made from 100% Dwayne Johnson chest hair, regardless of The Rock’s jokes) — it makes sense that he would feel especially connected to his own.
Credit: The Graham Norton Show
Emma Stone probably understands the Call Me by Your Name star as well. She had to shave her head for Bugonia, and despite knowing for a year and a half that the day was coming, Stone said she ended up “panicking” when the time came.
Timothée Chalamet’s hair will grow back, just as Emma Stone’s did (though I’m not sure he’ll rock the pixie cut as well as she did), and who knows — maybe a drastic haircut is part of the price he has to pay on the road to greatness. After the second Dune movie received some Academy Award attention (including a Best Picture nomination), we’ll just have to see what happens when Dune: Part Three is released a year from now on the 2026 movie schedule.