Timothée Chalamet Is an Angsty Teen Cannibal in the First Teaser for Bones and All

Timothée Chalamet certainly owes a debt to Luca Guadagnino. Despite his early turns in a range of big and small screen projects including Homeland, Interstellar, and Miss Stevens, it was Call Me By Your Name, the Italian auteur’s rhapsodic love story set in the fields and lakes of northern Italy, that sent the 26-year-old actor stratospheric. It established him as a Hollywood heartthrob, led to an Oscar nomination, and paved the way for him to secure starring roles in everything from Lady Bird and Little Women to The French Dispatch and Dune. Now, fittingly, he is returning to work with Guadagnino on his latest sun-dappled drama—and it’s one that could lead to awards glory for both of them.

Titled Bones and All, the film is an adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’s compelling novel of the same name which tracks a pair of teenage cannibals. The film’s log line describes it as “a story of first love between Maren, a young woman learning how to survive on the margins of society, and Lee, an intense and disenfranchised drifter, as they meet and join together for a 1,000-mile odyssey that takes them through the back roads, hidden passages, and trap doors of Ronald Reagan’s America. But, despite their best efforts, all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts and to a final stand that will determine whether their love can survive their otherness.” 

While Chalamet will play the brooding Lee, Taylor Russell, who broke out in Trey Edward Shults’s hallucinatory Waves, takes on the part of Maren. Meanwhile, the supporting cast includes Chloë Sevigny, Mark Rylance, André Holland, and Michael Stuhlbarg who, of course, played the kind-hearted father of Chalamet’s character in Call Me By Your Name.

The coming-of-age thriller is due to hit cinemas on November 23, but before that, it will premiere at next month’s Venice Film Festival. The announcement was made by the film’s official Twitter account on July 26, and was accompanied by two new stills. The first shows Russell’s Maren gazing into the eyes of Chalamet’s disheveled Lee, and the second sees the pair in the back of a pick-up truck, caked in dirt and presumably in the midst of their epic cross-country journey.

Then, on August 19, Chalamet unveiled the film’s first teaser trailer on his Twitter account. It opens with a spectacular shot of a car parked in an empty field at dusk, before cutting to Chalamet and Russell sitting face to face. “You don’t think I’m a bad person?” he asks her. Cue the sound of a woman screaming, as we catch glimpses of the pair kissing, Chalamet’s Lee jerking awake from a nightmare, and Mark Rylance in character staring intently into the camera. Then comes Russell’s reply as Maren. “All I think is that I love you,” she whispers.

Although the film is likely to mark Chalamet’s only appearance on screen this year (we last saw him as Jennifer Lawrence’s backwards-cap-wearing love interest in 2021’s Don’t Look Up), his devoted fanbase also has two major blockbusters to look forward to in 2023: Dune: Part Two, which is scheduled to drop in November and features him reprising his role as desert warrior Paul Atreides, and Wonka, which lands in December, and has him playing a younger iteration of the titular chocolate factory owner. Now that’s what you call range.