Timothée Chalamet was offered the role of Willy Wonka without an audition after the director saw "his high school musical performances on YouTube"

Despite rumors over the years that Warner Bros. courted Donald Glover, Ezra Miller and Ryan Gosling to play Willy Wonka, only Timothée Chalamet received the offer to direct director Paul King’s prequel musical comedy, “Wonka.” And Chalamet didn’t even need to audition. King recently told Rolling Stone that he was a “stan” of Chalamet and therefore knew the actor had the singing and dancing skills to play Wonka.

“It was a direct offer because he’s great and he was the only person in my eyes who could do it,” King said. “But because his name is Timothée Chalamet and his life is so absurd, his high school musical performances are on YouTube and have hundreds of thousands of views. So, as a Timmy Chalamet fan, I knew he could sing and dance really well. »

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King continued: “I knew it was in his arsenal, but I didn’t know how good he was. When I talked to him, he was really excited. He had tap danced in high school and he said, ‘I’d like to show people I can do this.'”

“Wonka” is a “real” musical that feels like “a really fun homage to the golden age of MGM musicals,” King said of the project. The director is best known for helming the “Paddington” films, but he said “Wonka” has a very different tone.

“I definitely tried to have darker characters than you would find in a Paddington movie, for example,” King told Rolling Stone. “Willy Wonka is in a crueler, meaner world, because that’s the kind of town Charlie grows up in. Unlike Paddington “In a world where Roald Dahl is a world where not everyone is nice. I certainly may have played with these grotesque ideas, but I hope not to harm a generation of children. »

“Wonka” hits theaters nationwide on December 15 from Warner Bros.

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