Timothée Chalamet thinks 'Beautiful Boy' is "extremely important".
Timothee Chalamet
The 22-year-old actor plays journalist and drug addict Nic Sheff opposite Steve Carell as his father in the upcoming movie and he feels a "pressure" to get the film released because he thinks young people really need to see it.
He told Deadline: "I feel the pressure of wanting to get Beautiful Boy out there. It's extremely important, not only for people all across America, but also for people my age.
"We're going through this, and inherent to that is the difficulty of discussing something that is really upsetting and devastating to a lot of families.
"But I think that's the importance of art and movies."
Timothée turned to YouTube for footage of drug addiction and also met with other addicts as part of his research for the role, but quickly released he needed to ignore "stereotypes" to be convincing.
He said: "Oh wait, addiction doesn't have a face. This isn't a bridge I have to cross to understand playing this. This is a human illness. Don't play the stereotype of a drug addict. Play a human who's addicted to drugs."
The Oscar-nominated star thinks the movie - which is based on Nic's autobiography, 'Tweak', and his father David Sheff's memoir of the same name - is particularly important because it doesn't glorify drug use and shows the real feelings of both addicts and those in recovery.
He said: "It's really an anti-glorification of drug use.
"If films with this subject matter lean into tragedy tonally, you're almost prepared for it. Or they lean the other way, into a kind of celebratory, upbeat, tragically cool thing. This is, hopefully, what the reality of it is.
"The subject matter is already tough, and we want the redemption of it to be in plain sight, but the honesty is in how f***ing terrifying it is to be using, and also how terrifying it feels to be sober."
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