Timothée Chalamet set to play Willy Wonka in origin story from Paddington director Paul King

Timothée Chalamet in Little Women — (Image credit: Sony Pictures Releasing)

Timothée Chalamet is set to take on the role of Willy Wonka in Wonka, the character's upcoming origin story movie, according to Deadline.

Paddington director Paul King will helm the project, and he co-wrote the script with his Paddington 2 writing partner Simon Farnaby. Plot details are being kept under wraps, but we know that the movie will focus on Wonka’s early days before he opened his infamous chocolate factory. According to Deadline, there'll also be some musical numbers in the movie – allowing Chalamet to show his singing and dancing skills on screen for the first time.

The role of the eccentric chocolatier has been taken on by A-listers in the past, with Gene Wilder playing Willy Wonka in the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Johnny Depp took on the role for Tim Burton’s 2005 reboot, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Based on Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s novel, the story of the original movies follows Charlie, a young boy who lives in poverty and wins one of five golden tickets to visit Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory that’s otherwise closed to the public. The other four children with golden tickets give into their desires during the tour and are ejected from the factory in a variety of darkly comic ways, until only Charlie is left and Willy Wonka names him as the heir to the chocolate factory.

We can next see Chalamet in the sci-fi epic Dune, as well as Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch, two movies that have suffered multiple delays at the hands of the pandemic. His last big screen role was in 2019's Little Women, and he's also known for his performances in romantic drama Call Me By Your Name and coming of age movie Lady Bird.

I’m an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering everything film and TV-related across the Total Film and SFX sections. I help bring you all the latest news and also the occasional feature too. I’ve previously written for publications like HuffPost and i-D after getting my NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism.