Getting nominated for the Academy Awards is a nearly impossible task and getting two is that much more difficult at such a young age, so the few who did inevitably leave a mark on film history.

While he was not the first to define youth culture in the 1950s, nobody rose quite so far and so fast as James Dean, who became one of the few actors to receive two consecutive nominations in his remarkably short movie career during that decade.

Only this year has an actor in their twenties been nominated twice in the Best Actor category, and Timothée Chalamet has proven himself perhaps more worthy than any other performer today.

Unlike Dean, who lived fast and died young, Chalamet is set to have a long future ahead of him, and he has not been confined to history just yet.

James Dean Earned Two Oscar Nods in Two Years

As popular as he was, one could argue that James Dean was also the classic case of an actor being in the right place at the right time.

Even still, the speed with which his career rose is nothing short of astonishing and something we are unlikely to see again. When he first entered the scene in 1955, his first film, East of Eden, gained vast attention due to his lead performance as Cal.

Expressing a vulnerability that would come to define him, the role enhanced his image as the rebellious teenager, one he very much embodied during his personal life as well.

Within months, Dean shot two movies and nearly starred in one more until he suddenly lost his life in a car crash, perhaps fittingly caused by reckless speeding.

As the most famous of his three films, Rebel Without a Cause premiered only a few weeks after his death and would forever cement his image, despite never being an awards darling that year.

Instead, East of Eden continued to earn praise, and it landed Dean the first posthumous Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role. At the time of his death, Dean was only 24 and the nominations were announced in February, just a few weeks after he would have turned 25.

Having finished filming a few weeks before his death, Dean also appeared the next year in Giant as Jett Rink, an unlikable cowboy who strikes it rich and later becomes an oil tycoon.

Perhaps because of just how radically different it was, this role remains his least known today, but it also displayed his range and diversity. The role was impactful enough that, combined with a separate nod for costar Rock Hudson, Dean earned a second posthumous Oscar nomination for Best Actor, becoming the only actor to do it twice.

Just three actors have been nominated after their deaths since then, and the fact that Dean would have just turned 26 at the time leaves one to wonder what else he could have achieved if given the opportunity.

At 29, Timothée Chalamet Is Only Just Getting Started

In the early half of the 2010s, Timothee Chalamet became fortunate enough to have a small role in Interstellar and had several others, but it was not until 2017 that he earned major attention.

That year, he starred with Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird, making the start of a longtime collaboration with Greta Gerwig as his director. This itself was an important milestone, but it was soon overtaken by his performance in Call Me By Your Name as a young college student in a relationship with an older man.

With his groundbreaking performance, Chalamet was nominated for Best Lead Actor at 22, surpassing Dean as the third-youngest nominee in history and the youngest since Mickey Rooney in 1940.

Since then, Chalamet has experienced a meteoric rise to fame, gaining praise from critics with his work as an addict in Beautiful Boy the following year. The casual audience also soon took notice, with Dune: Part One bringing him to international fame. His roles, many of them Oscar caliber, also displayed his incredible diversity as an actor.

In the span of twelve months, he charmed viewers with song and dance as the titular candy maker in Wonka, reprised his role as Paul Atredias in Dune: Part Two, and finally shocked many as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown at the end of 2024.

Today, Chalamet has earned another Best Actor nomination for playing Bob Dylan, singing and all, in the biopic. Whether or not he will win is an open question, but it’s almost beside the point here, as the fact that he has been nominated twice at 29 is a massive achievement in itself.

Chalamet may be a heartthrob like Dean was for his generation, but his career is already more expensive and is not frozen in time by tragedy.

Hopefully, he’ll have a chance to do what Dean never could and reach his full potential, one that might even rival the great classic actors like James Dean himself.