Timothée Chalamet Accepting Actor of the Year Award | London Film Critics' Circle Awards

Okay, thank you so much. What a tremendous evening. I think Paul said it best. This has been an absolute joy. I feel silly to get up here after Guillermo and Sally and Jesse's beautiful words just now. I'm jealous of the way your award got presented, though. There was real suspense in that. Anyway, you know, as everyone said, there's a legion of people to thank on every project. 824, Josh Safdie, Ronnie Braunstein, Eli Bush, the entire crew, Jack Fisk, Miyako Galitsi, Dan Lopatin, Jennifer Vendetti. This is an amazing group of artists that brought this together. Try to run through this. What a tremendous honor to be here tonight. My New York sense was I was going to be in a room of well-spoken Brits, so I can't prepare with a speech, so I wouldn't feel judged. If I'm here, it means you guys judged me in a good way, so thank you for the thumbs up. When I received this incredible news, as someone who's incapable of knowing when I've done a good job at times, I looked up a list of people who've been honored here in years past. I was overwhelmed to see many greats I've been lucky enough to work with or across paths with. Gary Oldman, Francis McDormand, the late Chadwick Boseman, to name a few. And going through the list, I saw my name in 2018, and I reflected on the eight years that have elapsed between then and now. I remember being here, actually, Hugh Grant won for Paddington 2, if I remember correctly, and he took the award, and he bolted right off stage, and that was going to be a way more effective bit if Guillermo didn't do the exact same thing just now. So they've gone back to back. You know, I was here years ago, precocious, nervous, fumbling with my words, unsure of how to proceed in this industry, nonetheless very grateful and excited and daunted about what was to come. I called my first drama teacher around that time, Harry Schiffman, asked him what he thought I was in for and where I was going from here. He replied that talent can be given, but mastery takes a lifetime. It comes with patience, discipline, and repetition. I've tried to throw myself into that, six years of playing the guitar, damn near daily to embody the social conscience of the 60s, six years of drilling my body to stay low, paddle extended from my elbow, six years of heading to Arrakis for 70 days at a time, every three years to honor the Atreides repetition. These last years have been a bit like the scene in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, where Philip Seymour Hoffman orders Joaquin Phoenix to cross back and forth in the room a zillion times to prove obedience. Talent is given, but mastery is earned. Elio Pearlman, the role I got to be here with eight years ago, is in a sense like Freddie Quill, raw id, someone who operates off of pure instinct, only thinks later, if ever, about repercussions. Marty Mouser is more like Lancaster Dodd, cunning, precise, delusional, but a leader nonetheless. I think sometimes our careers get conceptualized in arcs as if they were trajectories. I don't really believe in that. I think we're just running laps like athletes. Each project is simply a new loop on the track. I've been watching Cynthia Erivo run. She's gone. All right. She's gone. She left. Man. I wrote this sweet thing for Cynthia. She's gone. All right. I've been watching Cynthia Erivo run laps and she brought me to tears in the color purple, which is true. I was deeply moved by the lap that was Frankenstein. I was in awe of the lap that was one battle after another. To be in the presence of the master himself PTA tonight makes me giddy as much as it does to be in the other great artists in this room. Then I had a bit about Benjamin Brantley comparing Cynthia and I. I'm going to skip that. It was another compliment. Anyhow, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. I got massive respect for the film community in the United Kingdom. I'll leave little room for nuance when I say I'm making my aim to put forth work once more that lands me back here again. Thank you so much.