In Conversation

Pauline Chalamet Is Coming of Age, Again

The star of Mindy Kaling’s Sex Lives of College Girls on navigating her 20s, moving to Paris, and growing up in a family where the allure of art was “always there.”
Pauline Chalamet Is Coming of Age Again
Max Hoell

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You’d think making a show called The Sex Lives of College Girls would be messy, naughty fun. You’d be wrong. HBO Max’s new series, created by Mindy Kaling, was shot at the height of the pandemic; its stars, who play the titular freshmen, had to audition via Zoom for a job in which they were were constantly prodded apart by two-meter-long sticks and forbidden from socializing.

“It was not glamorous at all,” says Pauline Chalamet, who plays one of the freshmen. “We were all in the same hotel, but all on different floors, and were repeatedly told by the COVID team, ‘You cannot hang out.’ But it’s like, we’re all in L.A., we don’t know anyone. So we would go out on the patio; there was a fire pit, and we would sit six feet apart and play card games, masked-up, to try to get to know each other.” 

So Chalamet did get to know costars Amrit Kaur, Reneé Rapp, and **Alyah Chanelle Scott—**as well as Kaling, who co-wrote the series with Justin Noble. “I obviously admired her work before,” Chalamet says. “But to see her in action, which meant very focused on what was happening and quick-witted and able to listen…that is really what I admired about her presence on set. When she was on set, it was a very well-run ship.”

Pauline Chalamet, Amrit Kaur, Renée Rapp, and Alyah Chanelle Scott in HBO Max’s The Sex Lives of College Girls.Jessica Brooks

Filming her first TV show mid-pandemic while working with her professional hero did help Chalamet get into the right mindset to play Kimberly, a naïve valedictorian whose small-town, lower-middle-class Arizona upbringing definitely hasn’t prepared her for life at prestigious Essex College. “My way into [Kimberly] was her arriving at an institution where she felt out of place,” Chalamet, who attended the upstate New York liberal arts college Bard, says. “When I arrived, it was just so clear to me that there were those who had money and there were those who didn’t. And for me, that out-of-placeness has stayed with me my whole life.”

Of course, Chalamet’s upbringing wildly diverges from her character’s: “I grew up in New York. It was anything but sheltered.” Chalamet was raised in Manhattan Plaza, a federally subsidized housing complex for artists in Hell’s Kitchen, where she  grew accustomed to hearing her neighbors singing opera or playing piano during the designated resident rehearsal hours. A love of art “was in my family, and it was also really in the building in which I grew up,” Chalamet says. “It was always there.”

She dedicated most of her childhood to the arts, attending the School of American Ballet at age eight before performing with the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater. Following in the footsteps of her mother and uncle, Chalamet studied drama at Manhattan’s LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where her younger brother, Timothée, would also enroll. “By the time I graduated from high school, though, I was in a bit of a rebellious phase towards everything I had known growing up,” says Chalamet. She actively tried to steer clear of anything “too artistic” at Bard: “I was hell-bent on becoming a lawyer.” 

But while working part-time at the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization that works in partnership with the U.N., Chalamet found herself searching for something more. “I was also just floating. I didn’t really know. I liked studying, but at the same time it was like something in my life was missing,” she says. So she decided to straddle her two passions with a double major in political studies and theater and performance. 

Post-graduation, says Chalamet, is when she really found herself. “It’s after college that I started to tell myself that you have to persevere, and you have to sit in discomfort and let all the doubts and questions you have…they sometimes just have to sit around you, and you can’t answer them,” she says. And there were plenty of questions plaguing Chalamet when she moved to Paris, where she would spend the next seven years of her life. 

“I just didn’t really know what I was going to be doing,” she says. “It would give me a lot of anxiety. I just remember, I was probably like 23 or 24, being like, ‘Okay. It’s really shitty right now. And I think if I just let it be and accept that it’s shitty, maybe answers will start to come to me.’ They did eventually, but it’s really hard to sit in that discomfort. I have such amazing friends and great family, but it’s like, you are alone in those feelings.” It might have been helpful to realize that sooner, she says. “I kind of wish that earlier on, at Kimberly’s age, somebody had said, ‘You are alone. It may feel like you’re not because you’re living in a dorm, but you are alone.’”

Gradually, after stints in copyediting, tutoring, babysitting, and bartending, Chalamet began directing and acting in earnest. “I did a big old loop de loop [back to] right where I started, but I think it was ultimately incredibly beneficial, because then I was so sure of what I wanted to be doing.” But Chalamet still harbors a deeply rooted love of grammar—“Strunk and White is my favorite book”—and insists she could walk away from performing if she had to. “Now I’m like, ‘Okay, well, this is what I want to do for now.’ But I also don’t feel stuck in it, because I gave myself the opportunity to explore other things.”

Of course, because she’s leading a new TV series—while her brother, Timothée, currently has two major films in theaters, Dune and The French Dispatch—leaving it all behind may be easier said than done. “I mean, my brother and I laugh about it,” Chalamet says. “We were talking about it recently. We’re like, [working with] Warner Brothers, both of us. That’s crazy. It is; it’s surreal. I mean, just being in one movie in your life is surreal. Being in one episode of a TV show is surreal. It’s such a hard business. I don’t even have any other words for it.”

Surreal as it may be, their success hasn’t affected the Chalamet siblings’ real-life dynamic. “It has nothing to do with either of us. He didn’t choose that. I didn’t choose him as a brother; he didn’t choose me as a sister,” she explains matter-of-factly. “So it feels normal, but because it doesn’t impact our lives at all. It doesn’t impact our relationship,” which is mutually supportive. Pauline says she’s “in awe of the work that he does and the projects he works on,” just as Timothée “has come to almost every screening of a short film I’ve written or directed or acted in.”

As The Sex Lives of College Girls enters the world, has Chalamet found herself reflecting on her own coming-of-age? “Well, I love that I get a do-over,” she says, joking. She has been reading her old college journal again too. “I try to go back and tell my 18-year-old self when I’m reading these journal entries, you really had it more together than you think. And also, you’re not supposed to have it together at this age, so you were doing the best that you could. I’ve developed a lot more compassion for that age bracket—thinking you know it all and knowing you don’t.”

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