Bones and All takes Chalamet on a very different journey that is part drama, part romance and part horror. He plays Lee, a disaffected hipster drifter who finds solace in the company of 18-year-old Maren (rising actress Taylor Russell), despairing of her life in a trailer park. Together, they embark on a journey across America as a couple of lost souls who feed their existential hunger as vampire-like cannibals. Yes, cannibals.

“To be young now is to be intensely judged … it’s tough to be alive now,” mused Chalamet while promoting the film at its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September. “It was a relief to play characters who are wrestling with an internal dilemma, absent the ability to go on Reddit or Twitter or Instagram or TikTok and figure out where they fit in … They’re searching for their tribe.

“A big part of this story [is about] tribe-lessness, being cut off from the social contact that helps us understand where we are in the world. Not that we’re attention-hungry narcissistic beings, but nonetheless you need that contact to understand where you are and I felt a similar disillusionment that I think Lee was feeling in the script at that point.”

Chalamet, arguably, doesn’t have much to be disillusioned about. Dune director Denis Villeneuve hailed him as the “best actor of his generation”, adding “I needed that rock star charisma”. Certainly, audiences who see him in Bones and All will find themselves strangely attached to Lee’s flesh-eating ennui as he and his soulmate Maren traipse across the existential emptiness of the American Midwest.

Chalamet is the son of a French journalist father and an American dancer mother. He grew up in New York entertaining thoughts of becoming an actor from an early age, and at 14 was accepted into New York’s prestigious LaGuardia School for performing arts that inspired the 1980 hit film Fame.

He made his feature film debut in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) when he was 17 and has also appeared in 2019’s The King and Little Women, and 2020’s ensemble comedy drama The French Dispatch, directed by Wes Anderson. He has just wrapped filming on the sequel to Dune – and as a bilingual actor also fluent in French, he’s spoken about his desire to one day work in international productions.

Was it easy for you to identify with how Lee and Maren feel cut off from society?

Working on this film during the pandemic helped me feel the kind of alienation and isolation that are themes of the film, and the kind of states of mind that a lot of people, and especially my generation, feel about the world today.

As I get older, these are the stories I want to tell, these stories are about disenfranchised people who are disenfranchised existentially too, and feel they have no path in front of them.

You’ve spoken about Lee and Maren’s need to find their tribe. What do you mean by that?

I’ve found my tribe in New York, in Europe, even in Jerusalem. It’s been important for me to understand that there are many people like me in the world. I also found my tribe when I arrived very young in Italy to work with Luca [Guadagnino]. We became friends and now we’ve gotten to know each other again.

For me, finding a tribe means finding someone like me anywhere in the world. During the pandemic, I lost my grandmother, to whom I was very attached, and that left me feeling even more isolated.

It was a crisis for me, I was looking for myself – just like Lee – but during the pandemic I felt totally blocked off from the world. Even now I find myself struggling to get over that feeling.

Can you elaborate on that sense of being an outsider?

In the overwhelming digital age that we’re in, a lot of young people have this fear of judgment and self-judgment – what others will think. And this story is about two people that have a curse that is so awful and – thank God people in the real world don’t have this burden – but these two people are forced to grapple with it.

This is how they find each other and their inherent humanity is confirmed by each other in a way that maybe they didn’t believe was possible before they met.

What do you think is the nature of their love for each other?

I agree with something that Taylor [co-star Russell] said: that love can be a protector of your love. We often think that love is supposed to burn red and be this crazy, fiery experience, but it can also be an act of protection through devotion and it can be boring but still very important.

You grew up in a family of artists. When did you decide to commit to acting?

I had been acting since 2014 when Jason Reitman cast me for a role in Men, Women & Children, but, after working in several TV series, such as Homeland, I enrolled at Columbia University after graduating from high school.

At that point I was getting so many offers to work in film that it made it difficult for me to pursue my studies in literature. I think I already knew after Christopher Nolan hired me to play in Interstellar that acting was my real ambition in life. But it wasn’t until I did Lady Bird (2017) and my experience working with outstanding actors like Saoirse Ronan and Lucas Hedges. I learned so much from them and also from Greta Gerwig, the director, that I decided that I would totally dedicate myself to acting.

How do you see your career evolving in terms of the films you would like to make?

I want to make movies that matter and speak to people. It think it’s the role of the artist to shine a light on what’s going on.