Timothée Chalamet has once again teamed up with Marty Supreme director Josh Safdie, this time for a bizarre (and hilarious) feature in W Magazine, in which Chalamet once again takes on the role of a New York hustler with big dreams. But this time, those dreams don’t revolve around becoming a table tennis legend. They revolve around being a successful modded-game-controller salesman.
W Magazine’s wonderfully weird alternate-reality Chalamet goes by the name Shend and resides in Brighton Beach, where he lives with his mother. He has a pet rabbit named Otter and a day job as a doorman. But by night, he modifies controllers, which he sells out of the back of his car.
Honest-to-goodness gamer Chalamet has actually made money selling modded controllers in real life. Before becoming incomprehensibly famous, Chalamet had a YouTube account where he showed off his work under the name ModController360, which has since been deleted but forever preserved by the internet. Shend seems to be part fact, part fiction — a strange blend of Chalamet’s take on ping pong god Marty Mauser and Chalamet himself.
“I always like imagining alternate paths for Timmy,” Safdie told W of the unusual but charming collab. “Shend is inspired by a younger Timmy. A Timmy who had a YouTube channel where he tried to sell custom mod controllers. He saw money there.”
