Timothée Chalamet has once again teamed up with Marty Supreme director Josh Safdie, this time for a bizarre (and hilarious) feature in W Magazine, in which Chalamet once again takes on the role of a New York hustler with big dreams. But this time, those dreams don’t revolve around becoming a table tennis legend. They revolve around being a successful modded-game-controller salesman.
W Magazine’s wonderfully weird alternate-reality Chalamet goes by the name Shend and resides in Brighton Beach, where he lives with his mother. He has a pet rabbit named Otter and a day job as a doorman. But by night, he modifies controllers, which he sells out of the back of his car.
Honest-to-goodness gamer Chalamet has actually made money selling modded controllers in real life. Before becoming incomprehensibly famous, Chalamet had a YouTube account where he showed off his work under the name ModController360, which has since been deleted but forever preserved by the internet. Shend seems to be part fact, part fiction — a strange blend of Chalamet’s take on ping pong god Marty Mauser and Chalamet himself.
“I always like imagining alternate paths for Timmy,” Safdie told W of the unusual but charming collab. “Shend is inspired by a younger Timmy. A Timmy who had a YouTube channel where he tried to sell custom mod controllers. He saw money there.”
But modding controllers isn’t the fictional Shend’s only pastime. He also enjoys playing Yu-Gi-Oh! at his local card shop.
“When I was growing up, I was really into cards,” Chalamet explains in the article. “I remember being 12 or 13 and going to Midtown Comics to play, and I loved how the game brought all these different classes and races together. For Josh [Safdie] and me, one of the things we like about Shend is the total New York spirit, where you are so concerned you fit in nowhere that you then try to fit in everywhere.”
The W Magazine feature is littered with photos of Chalamet as Shend, rocking a short-cropped haircut and a blue Prada tracksuit. There are shots of him playing Yu-Gi-Oh! at the card shop, arguing with a potential customer over the phone, and lying on his bed, petting Otter.
If, while reading this, you find yourself thinking, “I’d much rather see this character in action,” well, Josh Safdie agrees with you. The fictional profile in W only features text and images, but Safdie says readers may one day see Shend — who Chalamet says was invented over the course of “maybe two or three conversations” — on the screen.
“What I love about this shoot is that it functions as a character test,” Safdie said after the eight-hour shoot had come to an end. “Now I know who this person is. Maybe now we can go and write a screenplay about him.”
As for Shend’s oddly named pet rabbit, Otter, the Marty Supreme director says it’s a representation of how he sees Chalamet: “As a giant Angora rabbit.” In fact, Safdie showed off Chalamet’s contact information to W Magazine on his phone. Instead of Chalamet’s face, his contact photo is a portrait of a large Angora rabbit.
Chalamet will appear later this year in the conclusion to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune trilogy, Dune: Part Three. You can see it in IMAX.
