Less than a year after A Complete Unknown hit theaters, Timothée Chalamet and filmmaker James Mangold have linked back up for another project: “Driven,” a kinetic, two-minute ad spot for the Arizona-based electric vehicle company Lucid Motors. Much as he did in the Oscar-nominated Bob Dylan biopic, Chalamet wears a sick leather jacket and briefly engages with a motorcycle…and, well, that’s really where the similarities end. The rest of the stylized, action-happy commercial finds Chalamet and a wedding-gown-clad companion (portrayed by model Larsen Thompson) infiltrating a fictional top-secret base in the desert outside Tuscon, stealing a spaceship-like Lucid Gravity SUV, and then peeling off into the sunrise as police cars give chase and a Yeah Yeah Yeahs bop blares triumphantly in the background.
“It was a gift,” Chalamet tells GQ via email about reuniting with Mangold. “A Complete Unknown is a totally different tone, we had never zoomed around on set together in cars. In many ways, it was a proof of concept.” (That last bit raises the tantalizing possibility of Chalamet and Mangold, who’s already directed one unimpeachable car movie in Ford v Ferrari, someday giving us their very own Bullitt.)
If Chalamet looks especially comfortable swerving across the dusty desert roads, that’s likely in part because it wasn’t his first time behind the wheel of a Lucid. “[This opportunity] happened very organically,” he says. “I had been driving around a Lucid that wasn’t mine but absolutely loving it.” And then, perhaps as the karmic result of the Knicks’ second-most famous superfan attending a Lakers game, “someone at Crypto.com Arena unfortunately crashed it.” Nonetheless, Chalamet says, when Lucid later reached out about a potential endorsement, he “leapt at the opportunity” given his “real-world experience to the level of craftsmanship involved.”
For a born-and-raised New Yorker, Chalamet—whose next feature, Josh Safdie’s A24 table tennis dramedy Marty Supreme, hits theaters on Christmas Day—takes real pleasure in driving. “I learned to drive when I was shooting Beautiful Boy in LA at 20 years old,” the actor, now 29, recalls. “Late by normal standards, but by NYC standards that’s early. I immediately loved the experience. Subway on wheels.”
And for anyone concerned that Chalamet’s commitment to Dylanology might’ve ended the moment his freewheeling Oscar campaign did, his response when asked for his go-to driving album should help assuage things: “The Times They Are A-Changin’ is the road trip album. Without a doubt.”
Eileen Cartter contributed reporting.
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