John Travolta celebrated Timothée Chalamet’s latest career milestone, proving Danny Zuko has nothing but love for Willy Wonka.
In an Instagram post shared on Tuesday, March 20, Travolta, 70, gave Chalamet, 28, a shout-out for becoming the first actor — since himself! — to have two simultaneous top-grossing films at the box office over the course of eight months.
“Congratulations Timothée! It’s great to have someone to share my box office record with, Sincerely, JT,” he wrote.
Travolta earned his badge of honor with Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978), holding onto the record for 44 years before Chalamet’s equally impressive ticket sales. Chalamet is currently topping the box office with Dune: Part Two and Wonka, the only two films to surpass $200 million since last July, according to IndieWire. (Just over two weeks after its release, Dune: Part Two has pulled in $400 million alone.)
Chalamet plays Paul Atreides in the Dennis Villeneuve-directed sci-fi film and Willy Wonka, the iconic chocolate maker, in Wonka. The actor admitted that taking on the role of Willy, made famous by Gene Wilder in 1971’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, was the “most physically challenging project” he’s ever done.
“I can’t say the singing and dancing comes easy,” he told Vanity Fair in December 2023. “I’ve been around musical theater my whole life, and danced a little bit in high school, but this was on a different level. … You’ve got to keep being in the center of the frame while dancing, you’ve got to rehearse for months, you’ve got to be on for every take.”
The professional dancers, he added, were “icing their ankles” between takes. “That’s how serious they were taking it,” he said. “It was a big challenge.”
Dance sessions were accompanied by vocal training, which Chalamet did with music supervisor James Taylor. He sang an ambitious six original songs, along with reprising the beloved “Pure Imagination.”
Chalamet underwent a similar amount of rigorous filming while shooting Dune: Part Two, which, at one point, involved pretending to ride an enormous sand worm through the desert. In a February interview with Screen Rant, he revealed that it took several months just to shoot that one moment in the film.
“We called it the Worm Unit, and you would get pulled onto that unit 20 or 30 minutes at a time, and they would slot the availabilities in relation to the main production schedule,” he explained. “It was awe-inspiring. There was a wall this size of a shot list that they were dedicating — like, you put three months to for what’s ultimately a three-minute sequence.”
Next up for Chalamet is the highly anticipated Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, currently in production. True to form, he’s taking rehearsals seriously, employing the vocal team who worked with Austin Butler on 2022’s Elvis.
“I’ve basically been working with his entire Elvis team for my Dylan prep,” Chalamet told GQ in a December 2023 interview. “There’s a wonderful dialect coach named Tim Monich. Vocal coach named Eric Vetro. Movement coach named Polly Bennett. I just saw the way he committed to it all — and realized I needed to step it up.”
