What I Saw at the Timothée Chalamet Lookalike Competition

It’s 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, and I’m wheezing and puffing down Greene Street, trying to catch up with a phalanx of wan, floppy-haired 20-something men competing for $50 and a Party City trophy. We’re racing to the second location of the Timothée Chalamet lookalike competition, which went viral last month after sparse fliers advertising the event started showing up downtown. Despite the lack of detail — a Partiful event advertised the location as “the Washington Square Park arch,” and none of the organizers would identify themselves — more than 2,500 people RSVPed. There are at least five times that many in attendance on Sunday — influencers, reporters, and blonde zoomers with curtain bangs, all clamoring to talk to a guy dressed as Chalamet in Wonka and handing out Snickers bars.

Before the event even begins, it’s obvious that many contestants are participating just to get a date: The Partiful page filled up with selfies and brooding thirst traps. “Some people seem to be taking this event really out of context,” Reed Putman, a substitute teacher from upstate New York, says. “They think this is gonna be some giant meat market.” Spencer DeLorenzo, a 22-year-old from Long Island, tells me he entered the contest in the hopes of getting some kind of job in film. After he posted his photo on the Partiful invite, he was approached by a film company to act as Chalamet’s double (though they turned him down when they learned he’s five-foot-three, compared to the five-foot-11 Chalamet).

DeLorenzo, who is single, says he’s had romantic prospects arise because of his resemblance to the actor. A female friend recently asked him to dinner so she could be seen in public with him, and he even signed an autograph as Chalamet when he was approached by a gaggle of girls while traveling in Italy recently. “If he didn’t exist, I would just be, like, another guy,” he says. “I suppose I have some sort of leverage looking like this attractive celebrity.”

There are plenty of women here searching for a Chalamet lookalike of their own. Sommer Mae Campbell, a 23-year-old actor and movie-theater employee from New Jersey wearing a knit cardigan and white lace tights, arrives with freshly printed business cards to hand out urging single Timothées to email her. “It’s so rare that all the skinny men of New York are in one place,” she tells me. Somewhere, she says, there’s a girl walking around in a shirt that reads “Timothées, Please Talk to Me.”

Once the event starts, however, it becomes clear that almost no one is going to have any substantive social interaction with anyone, save for perhaps getting trampled. The crowd is tens of thousands of people thick, an army of slender arms holding iPhones snaking upward in the event that Chalamet himself arrives. The only thing visible in the crowd is the Wonka impersonator’s top hat. It’s impossible to have a conversation without getting interrupted by someone who wants to make a TikTok. The crowds are so intense that by 1:10 p.m., New York City park rangers start demanding people vacate the area, prompting a slew of Chalamet doppelgängers to lead a parade to Mercer Playground a few blocks over. On the way, I spot a bunch of rangy men dressed as 1964-era Dylan outside NYU’s Elmer Bobst Library looking befuddled. (One Chalamet lookalike is reportedly arrested in the fracas, though both our photo editor and I are too busy fighting for our lives on the walk to the playground to witness this firsthand.)

Once people finally make their way to the new location, the event commences. The enigmatic organizer — who had previously identified himself only as “Gilbert” on the Partiful event page — finally reveals himself to be Anthony Po, a.k.a. AnthPo, a YouTuber who stages viral stunts like dressing as Cheeseball Man, a masked orange superhero famous for eating 985 cheese balls in public, or buying his friend 200,000 beans. The revelation that the entire competition has been staged for someone’s YouTube channel does not appear to come as a disappointment to the crowd, who raucously cheer when convincing Chalamet impersonators stride onstage and boo when less credible ones come up. “He’s hot,” a girl behind me gushes when one contestant walks across, “but he doesn’t look like Timothée.”

The audio quality is abysmal, and it’s almost impossible to follow the competition. What I am able to glean, perched from my vantage point atop a park bench, is that the contestants are asked a series of pageant-style questions by Po, like whether or not they speak French and how they plan to make the world a better place.

Lest there be any confusion about the intentions of the crowd members, the competition includes a “speed dating” event in which prospective Chalamet suitors — including Campbell, the girl who handed out business cards prior to the event — come onstage and present themselves, bird-of-paradise style, to the contestants. Timothées who are in a relationship are summarily booed; single Timothées, however, are introduced with aplomb. “Breaking news: Please welcome to the stage another Timothée who isn’t in a relationship!” Po cheers before introducing a contestant who traveled all the way from Australia (Spencer, the five-three lookalike, also receives a rapturous reception from the audience, but he arrives too late to qualify for the competition.)

The finalists come down to two Timothées: Zander Lueve, a 22-year-old from Atlanta, and 21-year-old Miles Mitchell, the Wonka impersonator. (When asked onstage what he would do to make the world a better place, Mitchell responds “Free Palestine” to relatively tepid cheers). The crowd ultimately selects Mitchell as the winner, though at the end, Po reveals every contestant will receive $50; the men start jumping up and down, grabbing one another, and chanting “Day drinking! Day drinking!” Other than my own fear of being trampled by girls in mary janes, it is probably the rawest display of emotion I experience all day. “We have a special type of bond right now,” Dempsey Bobbitt, yet another Wonka impersonator, excitedly tells me. “So many Wonkas, so many Timmies. It’s such a beautiful life.” A few feet away, another Timmy dressed as Bob Dylan plays a few bars on the harmonica.

“This event is so unserious!” Campbell gushes. “I’m really glad it went well and nobody was hurt, low-key.” She is riding the high of getting asked out by two different Timothées: Spencer and Cal, the Australian, who picked her out of the crowd for the speed-dating round. She agrees to go on a date with Spencer but is more interested in Cal. “I don’t want to scare him off,” she says when I encourage her to talk to him.

After I leave, I text Spencer, the lookalike who had hoped to find love or work at the event but had arrived too late to participate. He has a pretty good reason for showing up late: “I met Timothée Chalamet!” he texts me excitedly. As it turned out, while I had been fighting to get a good view of the event at Mercer Playground, Chalamet had appeared in Washington Square Park to take a few photos with doppelgängers before quietly sneaking away. (He did not, to my knowledge, show up at Mercer Playground; if he had, I honestly would have been worried for his safety.) “He said ‘hello’ and that I was looking good,” Spencer says. “He was smiling and seemed to live off the energy.” The competition, Spencer says, gave him a taste of what it’s like to be Chalamet. “It must stink, I wouldn’t enjoy being hounded all the time,” he writes. “Which is somewhat how it felt. Still, glad to be noticed :)”