Timothée Chalamet is one of the biggest actors around right now after starring in hit movies like Dune and Wonka. But before that, he was just a teenager on YouTube trying to get big by modding and painting Xbox 360 controllers. And the director behind his upcoming film, Marty Supreme, wanted the 29-year-old actor to tap into that part of his life while filming.
Arriving in theaters nationwide on Christmas, Marty Supreme stars Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a young and scrappy wannabe table tennis pro who works hard, deals with plenty of naysayers, and pushes through various obstacles on his mission to turn his passion into a career. To help Chalamet properly portray Mauser, who is loosely based on a real table tennis pro, Marty Supreme director and co-writer Josh Safdie told the young actor to remember his days making YouTube videos about gamepads.
“[Director] Josh [Safdie] wanted me to tap into, you know, he was always talking about, like, I modded controllers on YouTube growing up,” Chalamet told the BBC in a recent interview. “He’s like that part of you. He’s like the hustler part of you. The swaggerful part of you.”
And yeah, in case this is news to you: Chalamet used to have a small YouTube channel back in 2010 where he uploaded a few short videos of himself showing off modded and customized Xbox 360 controllers. The channel was aptly titled ModdedController360, and in 2021, Chalamet admitted to running the channel, which has since sadly been removed from YouTube. Thankfully, people have saved some of the videos, like this one of Chalamet, who never reveals his face, showing off a “sexy” red tiger paint job.
Here’s what Chalamet had to say about the channel back in 2021, when he revealed he was the one behind it: “I had a YouTube channel people found. It’s YouTube dot com back-slash ‘ModdedController360.’ And I used to paint-mod controllers, I did three, and I spray-painted them and…opened them up, and I would charge people $10.”
According to the actor, it didn’t take off, though he made $30 off three clients. If you own one of those controllers, I bet it’s worth a lot more than $10 in 2025.
