Timothée Chalamet Jokes Parents 'Cursed' Him by Giving Him a Name Everyone Pronounces Wrong
The actor told Jimmy Kimmel he's "not going along" with his parents' pronunciation of his first name
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Timothée Chalamet attends the 81st annual Golden GlobesTimothée Chalamet is setting the record straight on his name.
The Wonka star, 28, revealed the true pronunciation of his first name on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Thursday after host Jimmy Kimmel noted that he saw an accent over one of the “e’s” in his name on a billboard.
“Honestly it's ‘Tim-oh-teh,’ " Chalamet shared. “But I would not oblige you to say it like that and it can be Timothy or Timmy or Doug’ or Allen."
“It’s ‘Tim-oh-teh?' ” Kimmel, 56, asked.
“That's what it was supposed to be — my parents cursed me with that,” the actor responded.
“They did? And you were like, ‘No, I’m not going along with that,’ ” the late night host joked, to which Chalamet confirmed, “I’m not going along with that so, it’s whatever you like.”
Kimmel said that his name made sense because "Tim-oh-teh" rhymes with Chalamet. But the Dune: Part Two star disagreed because his middle name did not add to the rhyme.
“My middle name is Hal, which breaks it up in a — It breaks it up in a bizarre way,” Chalamet explained. Actress Florence Pugh chimed in, “That’s not the flow.”
This isn’t the first time Chalamet, whose father is French, has revealed the real pronunciation of his name, as he previously walked through it with Frank Ocean during an interview for VMan Magazine. He said at the time, “I can't ask people to call me that; it just seems really pretentious."
Chalamet told Ocean, "My dad is from France, so it's a French spelling, but it seems like too much of an obligation to ask people to call me that.”
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Several celebrities have since given him nicknames throughout the years, including his Dune costar Pugh, 28, who revealed on The Graham Norton Show that she liked to call him, “Timothée Chala-mala-bing-bong.”
“I loved his surname Chalamet and every time I read it, I read it as ‘Chala-mala-bing-bong,’ ” she said on the show, adding that it had come to the point where her family even began calling him that. “My gran met him last week and after she came up, she was like I met ‘Timothée Chala-mala-bing-bong.’ ”
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