Pauline Chalamet Aces It

“I’m really missing the boat on creating a book club,” Pauline Chalamet tells me. We’ve spent most of our interview poring over highlights from the Notes app file she keeps of her 2024 reading list, which includes The Age of Magical Overthinking (Chalamet recently befriended its author, Amanda Montell) and Tremor (Teju Cole’s novel about art, trauma, and identity). The actor averages one book per week, some of which are in French. Casual.

Left to her own devices, the Sex Lives of College Girls star would probably stick to the classics — like Anna Karenina, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Brothers Karamazov — so Chalamet relies on her fellow celebrity readers for more contemporary suggestions. She DMs with Kaia Gerber, who co-founded the book club Library Science and ultimately put Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz on her radar. Jennette McCurdy, author of I’m Glad My Mom Died, is another of her most trusted bibliophiles.

“We were at a Passover seder last year [with writer Alice Carrière], and the three of us didn’t talk to anyone else: All we did was shoot books back and forth,” Chalamet says. By the end of the night, Carrière suggested they all read The Kiss: Kathryn Harrison’s 1997 memoir about the sexual relationship she had with her father. “Within a week, Jennette and I were writing back to Alice being like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy!’ But it’s so worth reading.”

There was a moment in the actor’s 20s when she thought about becoming a writer herself. She’d just graduated from college and was living in Paris — where she currently resides and is Zooming from — tutoring, copywriting, and bartending. “I worked at this rock and roll bar that was open until 6 a.m., three times a week. On the little receipt paper, I would write ideas, and when I’d wake up at 3 p.m. the next day, I’d write stories,” Chalamet, now 32, says. “I submitted two short stories to publications, and then they didn’t get in anywhere. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not a writer. This is not for me.’”

The born-and-raised New Yorker has always placed high expectations on herself. A former ballerina, she performed with the New York City Ballet when she was as young as 10 years old. When she wanted to perfect her French, she asked her father (who’s a native speaker) not to answer if she spoke to him in English. And once she enrolled at Bard College, Chalamet was hyperfocused on selecting a major with real career potential.

“As much as people say, ‘You don’t need to know what you want to do, college is time to learn,’ there was no part of me that was like, ‘Oh, just enjoy the time!’” she says. Chalamet, who had ambitions of becoming a human-rights lawyer, graduated with a degree in both political science and theater and performance. “I never, ever felt unpressured, but no one was putting [that] on me except myself.”

As I listen to Chalamet explain the intense, analytical, and hyper-responsible way she has approached her career and ambitions, I find myself wondering — does she identify with the internet’s favorite Eldest Daughter Syndrome?

“A hundred percent,” she says, before citing the age difference between her and her younger brother, Timothée, as “three years, 11 months, and two days.” (When I ask her about this fall’s now-infamous Timmy look-alike competition in New York City, she lights up, saying, “I thought the whole thing was great. I love that it got shut down because they didn’t have a permit and the event got bigger than they thought it was going to be.”)

Chalamet says that her birth order has revealed itself in a love of rules. “I’m obsessed with grammar to the point where, in high school and college, I would openly correct people’s grammar in the middle of a conversation,” she admits, visibly cringing at herself. (Following our conversation, she sends me a voice note explaining the past perfect tense so masterfully that it’s never tripped me up since.) “It was so annoying. But I love grammar because I think it makes sense to me. I love structure and order.”

It follows that, with its tight three-act structure, the sitcom would be Chalamet’s ideal showcase for her talents. And in 2020, she scored what would be her breakout role in Max’s The Sex Lives of College Girls. For two seasons now, she has played naive fish-out-of-water Kimberly, navigating hookups, breakups, and friendship flare-ups. With the departure of co-star Reneé Rapp as a series regular in advance of the show’s new third season, though, Chalamet and her castmates have found a little more room to play within the show’s confines.

“It’s bittersweet, because her character’s obviously great, [but without Rapp’s character, Leighton,] it just gave the writers even more avenues to explore,” she says. “The season was really fun, seeing our individual storylines become a little bit more specific, and also being able to interact with new characters.”

Chalamet also recently gave birth to a baby girl, who’s only 7 weeks old when we speak in late October, and the actor is settling into a life with far less sleep and a much lower book-per-week average. (Has her brother’s girlfriend, Kylie Jenner, given her parenting tips? “I appreciate all the people in my life who have children and the advice that they have to give.”) The only major hiccup so far came with Chalamet’s — inadvertent — announcement that she’d become a mother, which happened when a roving camera at Stella McCartney’s Paris Fashion Week show captured her telling Greta Gerwig (who’s directed Timothée in two films) the good news.

“None of my friends had any empathy for me. They were like, ‘You were at a social event.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, but what?’” Chalamet says. “I was like, ‘You want to film that and sell it to someone? I hope you got good money for that, at least.’” Still, she concedes that it will make quite the humblebrag for her daughter one day.

And sharing stories with her kid is one part of parenting she’s especially excited about. “I never got into Harry Potter. I remember once I was at the School of American Ballet, and the fifth Harry Potter came out. I hadn’t read any of the other ones, but all the kids are devouring this book,” she says, her elder-daughter competitive streak showing once again. “So I started reading the fifth one, too, and I didn’t know what was going on. I was like, ‘This is boring.’ But I will say that now I’m kind of excited to read them all.”

Top image credits: Schiaparelli clothing and tie, Jacquemus earring