Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey came together for a one-of-a-kind town hall conversation hosted by Variety and CNN. The program, which aired Feb. 21 on CNN, is now available to stream on Variety‘s YouTube channel, along with bonus footage.
“A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey,” which was filmed before a live audience of University of Texas at Austin’s students, marked a reunion for Chalamet and McConaughey, who played son and father in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 sci-fi epic “Interstellar.”
In the 90-minute conversation, the actors discussed their memories from “Interstellar,” Chalamet’s role in “Marty Supreme,” their approaches to acting and more. Chalamet and McConaughey also answered questions from audience members throughout the evening.
“Man, that’s remains my favorite project I’ve ever been in,” Chalamet told McConaughey about “Interstellar.” “I think it’s your most fantastic role. I know you were coming off ‘Dallas Buyers Club,’ but that movie, to me, was the origin point in seeing how you carried yourself on set, how seriously you and Christopher Nolan took the work. It gave me a license. Coming out of high school, it’s hard to take yourself super seriously. You can feel like you’re wasting time or stuck-up or something. And I remember you had a yoga mat, and you’d be working out and sleeping on set. It was all very strange to me. But it was super inspiring. I just can’t thank you enough for being warm to me at that time, when you had no reason to be warm to me. Christopher as well. It just changed my life, man.”
McConaughey responded, “Thanks for that, man. You were pretty easy to be warm to. I remember you had what I felt like was a feverish curiosity at that time. You were figuring some stuff out, but it seemed obvious to me that no matter what you were dealing with, you were going to make your way. And I believe you were in some sort of limbo. You were choosing — something about music, and somebody was putting pressure about, ‘Maybe go this way,’ and you wanted to go this way.”
At one point, Chalamet shared new details about “Dune: Part Three,” which opens in theaters this December. He teased that the final film in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi trilogy is the “eeriest one” and a “big swing.”
Chalamet later added, “I didn’t want to be complacent about a single moment. Everything was sacred, and it was my last time doing a ‘Dune’ film, so I really wanted to treat it as sacred. Because people can get complacent, but I was more intense on the third one. It felt like that was the natural momentum, so I wanted to push against that as hard as I could.”
Watch “A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey” below.