Timothée Chalamet's Secret YouTube Channel Is Pure Gold
We all have that one home video we'd rather nobody ever see again. If you grew up before the smartphone era, it might be a clip of little you rocking out while your parents film on a camcorder. For those of us born into the digital world, however, the wound might be self-inflicted — grainy YouTube videos talking about Minecraft or Sonic the Hedgehog. Maybe you even dipped your toes into animation on Newgrounds.
Most of the time, these embarrassing artifacts lay dormant. But when the creator ends up becoming a world-famous actor and the star of Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" movies, they're bound to come back up. That's right: Once upon a time, Timothée Chalamet was just like the rest of us — a precocious kid who loved "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" and sold custom-modded Xbox 360 controllers to fellow gamers on the internet.
Though you can't make out his face or recognize his pre-pubescent voice, that is indeed Paul Atreides himself hawking a custom-spray-painted Xbox controller under the moniker ModdedController360. The color scheme, which he describes as "red tiger," is a specific reference to a rare gun color that was unlockable in the early "Modern Warfare" games. Though the original account is no longer active, YouTube user Dracyan Archives was kind enough to re-upload some of its videos for historical preservation. Chalamet confirmed this as his account in a 2021 interview with Nate Hill. He also said he only ever sold three controllers from his little modding business before his parents grew tired of him getting spray paint everywhere.
Timothée Chalamet is still a big gamer today
Though he had stopped selling modded controllers by the time his film career took off, Timothée Chalamet is still a pretty serious gamer. In a "Wonka" red carpet interview with IGN in 2023, he said that he'd finally played "Red Dead Redemption 2" and loved it. Just a few months earlier, Chalamet appeared at the Game Awards to announce the 2023 game of the year, "Baldur's Gate 3." Host Geoff Keighley introduced him at the show as ModdedController360.
If this was something you didn't know about Timothée Chalamet, revel in the newfound discovery. His old videos — short and few as they are — remain hilarious time capsules of the early 2010s. "Shout out to 'Modern Warfare 2,'" the future star adds at the end of the video above. "Best video game right now." And boy oh boy, if you were a gaming-obsessed pre-teen playing M-rated video games in 2010, you'll know just how true that was.
Of course, fans of the golden era of "CoD" may not be so happy to know Chalamet was a self-professed trigger modder, turning the single-fire FAL rifle into a rapid-fire game ruiner. So just know that if you ever rage quit out of a team deathmatch round on Favela, it might have been Willy Wonka wracking up killstreaks on the other team.