LeBron James’ 2009 Documentary Motivated Timothée Chalamet to be Great

The 98th Academy Awards will be given out just over a week from now, and when the winners are announced, there’s a pretty good chance that Timothée Chalamet will be this year’s Best Actor winner. Chalamet played the titular role in Marty Supreme, and throughout awards season, he’s been considered the favorite to take home his first Oscar.

This is his third Oscars nomination to go with his nods for Call Me By Your Name and A Complete Unknown, making him the youngest male actor to ever be nominated three times. Chalamet hasn’t hidden the fact that he wants to be considered one of the best actors ever. When he won the 2025 SAG award for his role as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, he said in his acceptance speech, “I want to be one of the greats.” So far in this career, he’s followed through on that.

Off screen, Chalamet is known as a New York Knicks superfan and overall basketball junkie. He can frequently be found courtside at Madison Square Garden, and in an amazing crossover, he was a guest on a recent live taping of Mind the Game with LeBron James and Steve Nash. There, he revealed that LeBron had a formative influence on him growing up.

Asked by Nash how he connected to the role of a Big Apple ping pong prodigy in Marty Supreme, Chalamet said, “That was exactly it. Majorly ambitious as a New York youth to find athletic greatness the way these two men next to me [Nash and LeBron] found it. I never found it in my own life, but I had that aspiration, that Jose Alvarado, whatever you want to call it, that ‘dream big’ mentality.”

While admitting that he reveres LeBron so much that he can’t even look him in the face, Chalamet confessed that he drew inspiration from “the Chosen One” many years ago.

“His whole career,” Chalamet said, “but really ‘More Than a Game,’ the 2009 documentary about LeBron in high school and his classmates, his best friends, that was hugely impactful for me, man, that’s the life I aspired to have. I didn’t find it in athleticism, but I was able to find it in acting, and thanks to Josh [Safdie], I found it in this role, I got to put it out there for the first time.”

Coming from most people, that might seem like pandering to the host, but Chalamet has the street cred to back it up. This is a guy who was asking Amar’e Stoudemire to autograph his Knicks jersey as a kid, and who wowed the college football world with the depth of his knowledge as a guest picker on College Gameday. Timmy knows ball, so when he says that LeBron’s documentary inspired him, believe it.