Despite reports over the years that Warner Bros. was courting the likes of Donald Glover, Ezra Miller and Ryan Gosling to play Willy Wonka, it was only Timothée Chalamet who got the offer to lead director Paul King’s prequel musical “Wonka.” And Chalamet didn’t even have to audition. King recently told Rolling Stone that he was a Chalamet “stan” and thus knew the actor had the singing and dancing chops required to play Wonka.
“It was a straight offer because he’s great and he was the only person in my mind who could do it,” King said. “But because he’s Timothée Chalamet and his life is so absurd, hishigh school musical performancesare onYouTubeand 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.’”
“Wonka” is a “proper” musical that feels like “a really fun hat off to the golden age of MGM musicals,” King said of the project. The director is best known for helming the beloved “Paddington” movies, but he said “Wonka” has a much different tone.
“Certainly, I tried to have darker characters than [what] you would find in a‘Paddington’movie, for example,” King told Rolling Stone. “It’s a crueler 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‘Paddington’world, not everyone is nice in aRoald Dahlworld. I definitely got to play with those grotesque ideas, but I hope not to damage a generation of children.”
“Wonka” opens in theaters nationwide December 15 from Warner Bros.
