Timothée Chalamet He is becoming the actor of the moment. Now he is the absolute protagonist of Wonkathe prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But soon we will see it in There are 2 (obviously, he was in the first one with Zendaya) and he will even be Bob Dylan.
And he will not only play the musician, but he will also sing.
It is that one of the many reasons why the British director Paul King chose the actor from call me by your name is that he discovered that he knew how to sing and dance.
And it seems that it was a lie that Warner Bros. wanted Ryan Gosling, Ezra Miller (the problematic Flash) or Donald Glover to play the teenage Willy Wonka. Well, Chalamet is not exactly a teenager (he turns 28 on December 27) and he didn’t even have to go through a stage of auditions, reading text, allowing himself to be filmed and photographed.
Once he was commissioned to make the prequel, King, director of both Paddington, as he considered himself a fan of the actor, was already aware of “his singing and dancing skills… It was a direct offer because he is great and he was the only person I had in my head to do it. It was him or it was nobody,” King said.
Willy Wonka is a fictional character, created by British writer Roald Dahl for his children’s books. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory y Charlie and the big glass elevator. In the cinema he was played, until now, by Gene Wilder (in 1971) and by Johnny Depp (in 2005).
Unlike WonkaTim Burton tried to use as few special effects as possible in his version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factorysince 2005, and he inserted fragments of the chocolatier’s childhood: Willy Wonka is the son of a dentist, Dr. Wilburg Wonka (Christopher Lee). Dr. Wonka’s obsession with dental hygiene leads him to forbid his son from eating chocolate or any other sweets just to eliminate the slightest possibility of his son getting cavities.
Some curiosities about Burton’s film: Nestlé sent 1,850 kilos of real chocolate bars for the film. The writer Roald Dahl was a guy who hated stuck-up, spoiled children. Willy’s treatment of four of the five boys who earn entry to the chocolate factory by getting the 5 golden tickets hidden at random in different chocolate bars is understandable.
And more than 900 thousand liters of fake chocolate were needed to fill Willy Wonka’s entire factory.
hateful comparisons
If comparisons tend to be odious, every spectator who goes to see Wonka He will make his confrontation, first with Johnny Depp, the protagonist of Tim Burton’s 2005 film. And some may dare to compare him with the one played by Gene Wilder in 1971.
Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka was just as eccentric as Chalamet’s, but more cynical and somewhat perverse. He hid behind huge glasses and managed to develop practically impossible products, such as ice cream that does not melt or candies that do not lose their flavor.
In the original, Slugworth and Fickelgruber are two chocolatiers envious of Willy Wonka’s success, and they send spies to steal his secret recipes. In WonkaKing already uses them as two of the three chocolatiers who do not want Willy in his adolescence to open his chocolate shop in the gallery where his businesses are located.
Oompa-Loompas
And the Oompa-Loompas? They were originally pygmies (changed by dwarf hippies in a reissue of the book), who jump from Africa to work in Wonka’s factory. Before, in Africa – then Loompaland, to avoid the accusation of being racist for Dahl’s slave-like treatment of the Oompa-Loompas. They ate disgusting-tasting green worms and tried to combine them with red beetles and the bark of the bong-bong tree. What they wanted were cocoa beans. Willy Wonka offered the tribe to move to his factory, since in exchange for working for him, they would receive cocoa beans.
In Wonka Another story is told: how Willy arrives as a young man to the island where the Oompa-Loompas are, and takes advantage of the fact that one of them, a guardian (Hugh Grant), is asleep, to take several cocoa beans.
In the film released this Thursday, the Oompa-Loompa (who no longer looks like Eduardo Duhalde as in Tim Burton’s film) comes to visit Willy, demanding that he pay off that debt. They usually bring sweets magically made by the chocolatier, some of them make those who try them fly.
The star of Four Weddings and a Funeral He said in a press conference that he was not very happy during filming, since he had multiple cameras directed at his face, something necessary so that the animators would later digitally eliminate the rest of his body and leave him with a tiny little body.
“It was like wearing a crown of thorns, very uncomfortable,” Grant said. “I made a big fuss about all that, I couldn’t have hated it more,” and he clarified among jokes that the problems continued throughout the filming, since he didn’t understand if he had to act with his whole body or just his face. “I never received a satisfactory answer,” he sent. “Frankly, what I did with my body was terrible, and it was all replaced by an entertainer.”
The first adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book, which was published in 1964, was only seven years later, in 1971, when it was released. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the version with Gene Wilder directed by Mel Stuart. Dahl adapted his own book as a screenwriter.
Dahl is known for being the author of characters as diverse as they are engaging, going from little Matilda who suffers from her parents and Chontratoro, the school principal, to Jim, who found himself with a giant peach. And speaking of giant, he was also the author of The giant good friend, which became one of Steven Spielberg’s weakest films. It also hit theaters in 2020 The witcheswith Anne Hathaway, directed by Robert Zemeckis, the director of Back to the Future y Forrest Gump. He didn’t make a mistake either, just like Spielberg.
“I tried to have darker characters than you would find in a Paddington movie,” King told the magazine. Rolling Stone. “It’s a crueler, meaner world that Willy Wonka finds himself in, because that’s the kind of town Charlie grows up in. Unlike the world of Paddington, not everyone is nice in Roald Dahl’s universe. “I could definitely play with those grotesque ideas, but I hope not to harm a generation of children.”