Timothee Chalamet and Hugh Grant put the ‘sexiness back into chocolate’

Director Paul King is responsible for three of the sweetest films in cinema – the two Paddington movies and now Wonka – but you know what he really likes? Making children cry.

“It’s probably the most evil thing I’ve done in my life,” says King over Zoom. It’s the kind of confession that would secure him a position as one of Roald Dahl’s most rotten villains, the kind who really does enjoy torturing children before meeting a horrible end.

The candy man can: Timothee Chalamet as Willy Wonka.Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures / Village Roadshow

“I want to have everyone crying,” continues King, as he begins to tell the story of an early screening of his 2017 hit Paddington 2. “We [King and co-writer Simon Farnaby] did a test screening before it was released, and we didn’t even have the bear because none of the animation was done. So it was just this big blob moving around on screen.

“And we got to the last scene, which was one of the hardest bits to get right, and we were watching it with an audience for the first time and there’s the moment where Paddington reunites with Aunt Lucy and there are these kids in front of us. And one child turned to another and said, ‘It’s Aunt Lucy’ and started crying. And we looked at each other and very gently high-fived.”

Timothee Chalamet and director Paul King on the set of Wonka.

See, despicable. But if there’s anyone who can happily confess to making children – and yes, grown-ups cry – it’s King, who has done it again with Wonka, starring Gen Z favourite Timothee Chalamet as the baby-faced chocolatier and forever favourite Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa. They are two actors who are at the beginning and towards the end of their heart-throb era.

“And they’ve both been in James Ivory movies as very young men because Hugh was in Maurice and Timothee was in Call Me By Your Name,” says King. “They’re a real kind of [generational] crossover, which is strange. Maybe Hugh gives us an insight into what Timothee will look like in 40 years.”

Orange, possibly.

“A hideous thought.”

Timothee Chalamet as Willy Wonka and Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa in Wonka.

Wonka is the first time Road Dahl’s estate has allowed a story to be told that wasn’t just a remake of one of his books, says King. As such, the 45-year-old Brit considers Wonka to be less an origin story and more a companion piece to Dahl’s original 1964 book and the two Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory films that followed.

“There’s a kind of slight heart-sinking feeling to that, where you go, ‘What, are we doing the origin story of now?’” he says. “So, I was probably as apprehensive as anyone when the idea was first suggested, especially because I loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a kid. It was a book I read from cover to cover endlessly.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was the only children’s book Roald Dahl’s wrote a sequel to.

“But when I went back to Charlie, as a grown-up, I remembered the factory and I remembered the Oompa Loompas and the larger-than-life grotesque characters who were in it, but what I realised I’d completely forgotten was the huge amount of emotion at the heart of it, and how it’s this almost Dickensian fable of a poor little suffering kid. One of the early chapters is called something like, ‘The family begins to starve’.

“That seems like quite gritty stuff. And then at the end, when [Charlie] inherits the chocolate factory, I was in floods of tears, and I’d forgotten that. And that combination of strong, heartfelt emotion, and comedy is everything that I love doing in the Paddington movies. And, suddenly, it seemed like a really exciting idea.”

Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the movie Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory. Wonka is considered a companion film to the 1971 film.

Willy Wonka is also one of the few characters Roald Dahl revisited, with the sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator and in another short story. But while we know the adult, 50-something Wonka, owner of the greatest chocolate factory in the world, we don’t really know the bright-eyed 20-something who dreamt it into existence. And this is where Wonka starts.

Chalamet’s Wonka is an optimist and a disrupter, obsessed with making the best chocolate the world has ever eaten – just like the chocolate his mother made for him. He travels from the US to Europe and lands in an unnamed city that is a magical mix of London, Paris and Milan but is ruled with an iron fist by the Chocolate Cartel. Not to be deterred, Wonka partners with an orphan called Noodle and the rest, well, you can guess.

Paul King (middle) with his two leading men, Hugh Grant and Timothee Chalamet, on the red carpet for the film’s premiere in Paris.Credit: Getty Images

Casting Chalamet was, of course, a no-brainer, says King, even if New York magazine has declared Wonka has possibly signalled the end of Chalamet’s heart-throb era.

“I think we just brought the sexiness back into chocolate,” says King. “He’s brilliantly funny and can do that eccentric, manic, strange thing, but he can also carry the emotional heart of the movie like nobody else. And what was interesting for me about this project was obviously Charlie is the heart of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, whereas this is all about Willy Wonka. And you see his hopes and fears rather than a little kid’s. So it was a different challenge [compared to the actors who played the role before].”

And then there is Grant as the Oompa Loompa called Lofty. King first worked with him on Paddington 2, where Grant sent himself up mercilessly playing the villain Phoenix Buchanan and then ended the film doing a razzle-dazzle dance in a pink sequinned prison jumpsuit.

“For a very beautiful person who has spent much of his life being admired by the rest of the world, he seems to have no vanity whatsoever,” says King of Grant. “And maybe because of that, I think he’s very happy to do these roles that make him look totally ridiculous. And I was very proud that in Paddington 2 we got him in a dog costume eating dog food. And there was only one place to go, which was green hair and orange skin and the size of a doll.

Roald Dahl in the converted hut where he did much of his writing.Credit: Brian Moody

“And when you see him, it just seems so wrong that it’s right because his voice is perfect. And he captures that sort of sarcastic, incredibly witty, eloquent spirit that they have in the Dahl poems that are the funniest, most savage parts of the book. And I really wanted that scornful savagery to have a place in our movie.”

Dahl’s refusal to sugarcoat the rough stuff is partly why he has caused controversy ever since his first children’s book, James and the Giant Peach, was published in 1961. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had accusations of racism levelled at it because it was thought the Oompa Loompas “had objectionable overtones of slavery”. Even as recently as February this year, publisher Penguin Random House announced it was changing some of Dahl’s language to make it more inclusive (“fat” and “ugly” were out) but they backed down after a public outcry.

King, however, has a gentler bent than Dahl, so did he feel the need to soften some of Dahl’s harsher edges?

“It’s a very good question,” says King. “I think Dahl’s sensibility is certainly spikier than mine in general, but I also feel there’s a lot of people, especially grown-ups, who have read Dahl as a child and some of the kinds of things that happen [in the books], loom larger in their imaginations than perhaps they are in the book.

“What I feel people sometimes forget about Dahl is the kindness, and that there is a spirit of generosity at the heart of it and that’s why [the books] work. I think we focus on the grotesquerie because it’s less common in kids’ books and that is what makes him stand out. But there’s also heart and warmth there.”

When Wonka ends – and this gives nothing away – there are about 25 years before the start of the book, during which time Wonka disappears and then reemerging as a slighly sour individual who gleefully toys with a bunch of, admittedly, ratbag children before choosing Charlie. Surely, there’s a sequel?

“I love Frank Capra movies,” says King. “And I was really interested in a kind of kind-hearted innocence going into the world and discovering that the world is not the sweet place that they hoped it would be, and beginning to develop that bit of steel that Mr Smith has when he goes to Washington.

“And it felt like it gave us a beginning, middle and end. I didn’t want to go, ‘Here’s part one’ and then, ‘Guess what? At the end of the movie, there’s another 12 parts, and you’ve got to come and see seven Willy Wonka films.’ I wanted to make a movie that stood on its own, but there is certainly a journey between him at 25, as he is in our movie and him at, say, 50, as he is in the Gene Wilder movie. I would love to make another one, but who knows. It’s a bad time to ask that question, I’ll just start sweating with fear.”

What about Matilda’s Mrs Trunchbull, does she need an origin story to soften her up?

“I would not equate her with Willy Wonka,” he says, laughing. “I really feel the point of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that those kids come to the factory and they are the authors of their own demise. It’s their greed that brings them down. It’s not like Willy Wonka is an Equaliser figure, slowly assassinating the children, though, it seems to be how some people remember it.”

Maybe that could be the name of the sequel, Wonka: The Equaliser?

“He’s back and this time he’s taking no prisoners.”

Paddington 2, which was ranked by Rotten Tomatoes as the most perfect film of all time, is getting a sequel, Paddington in Peru.

The other sequel King has been working on, though not directing, is the third Paddington film, Paddington in Peru. It’s not out for nearly a year, but anticipation is already sky-high.

“I feel confident that it’s going to be great and if it isn’t, I will be livid,” he says. “You’ll see the non-sweet side of me coming out in defence of my bear.”

See, told you he was nasty.

Wonka is now in cinemas.

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