Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet on drugs, disillusionment and playing father and son

In Beautiful Boy, Chalamet plays a teenager hooked on crystal meth, Carell his father. They talk about the challenges of their roles – and missing out on best actor Oscars

Beautiful Boy is based on a brace of memoirs that together provide a father-and-son, “he said, he said” account of the same story. The books in question are Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff, and Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction by Nic’s journalist father, David. Timothée Chalamet – currently Hollywood’s hottest young actor after his Oscar nomination for Call Me By Your Name and love interest in the also Oscar-nominated Lady Bird – plays the teenager hooked on crystal meth. Steve Carell is the father trying to understand what has happened to his apparently perfect, happy-go-lucky son. The film displays an unusual commitment to the cyclical nature of addiction, where promises are followed by relapses and feelings of shame followed by yet more promises. It is essentially a two-hander, so it seems only right that the actors should be performing promotional duties together.

Carell, 56, is the first to arrive in our London hotel room. He is wearing a dark brown suit, white shirt and tie, and is unfailingly genial. While we are waiting for Chalamet to arrive, I produce from my bag a book that I happen to be reading: Improv Nation, Sam Wasson’s history of American improvisational comedy, which includes material about Second City, the Chicago-based troupe in which the likes of Carell, Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert cut their teeth. I flick to the page showing Carell, Colbert and two other comics dressed as the Beatles. It is a photograph he hasn’t seen for many years and he looks genuinely gobsmacked. “Oh wow. This is incredible.”

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