Timothée Chalamet isn’t the only famous Chalamet in Hollywood — the Dune actor has an older sister named Pauline Chalamet, who also acts.
The born and raised New Yorker is one of the stars of Mindy Kaling’s hit Max series, The Sex Lives of College Girls.
While she and her brother are both accomplished actors, success has not affected their relationship. “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,” Pauline told Vanity Fair in 2021. “So it feels normal, but because it doesn’t impact our lives at all. It doesn’t impact our relationship.”
The famous siblings are supportive of each other’s careers. Pauline previously told Vanity Fair that she is “in awe of the work” her brother’s work, and that Timothée “has come to almost every screening of a short film I’ve written or directed or acted in.”
So, who is Pauline? Here is everything to know about Timothée Chalamet’s sister.
She is older than Timothée
Timothée is younger than his sister. Pauline was born in January 1992, while her brother was born in December 1995.
During an interview to promote Little Women, Timothée spoke about his sister being his best friend and having an “incredible relationship” with her now. However, he also shared that growing up, she’d put his shoes in places he couldn’t reach.
Pauline even had a photo of herself pulling his hair as her desktop photo. The Call Me by Your Name actor recalled, “She made that her desktop picture, so every time I went in her room it was like I was suffering on her screen.”
She grew up in an artist colony
Pauline grew up in an artist colony in New York City. “It was a very special place to grow up, in retrospect,” she told Julie Bowen on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “While I was growing up there, I think I was a little overwhelmed by the fact there were many different types of performing artists that lived there, and you would be hearing singing and dancing.”
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Pauline said a love of art “was in my family, and it was also really in the building in which I grew up,” adding, “It was always there.”
She used to do ballet with Sarah Hyland
When she was a kid, Pauline did ballet with Modern Family star Sarah Hyland.
On The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Timothée’s sister shared, “We would go together for pizza a lot after ballet or before, and she actually taught me that I could put parmesan cheese on top of my pizza. I didn’t know that until Sarah.”
She went to Bard College
Pauline studied at Bard College in New York, where she double-majored in political studies and theater and performance. “I became a really good student at Bard and I fell in love with learning,” she in 2021. “I cannot say I liked going to Bard. For me, I think it was very small. I felt money pressure. I really felt you needed to have a certain amount of money to be there.”
She added, “I was dating a boy at the time who was a photographer and so sweet, and I really credit him with why I stayed. I had this shift around sophomore year, where I was like, ‘I’m either making the most of this or I’m leaving.’ “
On the red carpet at the 2018 Critics Choice Awards, Timothée revealed that his sister “changed her major at college” because of director Greta Gerwig. Pauline agreed, saying, “Yeah.”
She is an actress
Pauline plays Kimberly on The Sex Lives of College Girls, which debuted in 2021.
When news of his sister’s role was reported in 2020, Timothée celebrated by sharing a screenshot of a Deadline article about the cast on his Instagram Story. The proud brother tagged Pauline and added applauding emojis.
Prior to starring on the Max series, Pauline had a role in Judd Apatow’s 2020 movie, The King of Staten Island.
Pauline wasn’t always certain that she wanted to be an actress. “I did and I didn’t. I went about it in many different ways,” she said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “I had a long path to getting where I am.”
Timothée loves his sister’s show
Pauline’s younger brother is a fan of The Sex Lives of College Girls. “ My brother loves it,” she told E! News in 2022. “You’ll have to get the story from him, because I believe he did watch it with one of my parents. So that is that.”
Timothée’s big sister speaks both English and French. Pauline told Interview Magazine that it was difficult pretending she didn’t speak French for her character in The Sex Lives of College Girls.
“There was an accent coach on set for the people who spoke French. She heard me try and put on [a] bad accent and started to work with me,” Pauline said. “It was interesting to learn which words are difficult if you don’t grow up speaking the language.”
She is musically talented
Not only can Pauline act, but she can sing and play the piano. In 2020, she posted a video of herself singing a song in Italian.
“It came to me from my childhood and probably started with musicals,” she told L’Officiel in 2021 of her passion for music. “Because in fact, when you go to see a musical, there are the scenes that are acted and then, it’s like there’s a point when acting and speaking are no longer enough and you have to go through singing to communicate with the person in front, and that, I liked. That was a bit of my discovery of music.”
The actress shared that she takes “enormous pleasure in making and listening to music” because it relaxes her.