Nothing about college was funny for Pauline Chalamet.
She didn’t have a Seth Meyers poster plastered in her dorm, never got to go to the weekly ragers at Essex College, or experience any of the general hilarity that her character does on The Sex Lives of College Girls. Instead, her college years at Bard College—just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Vassar, where the show shot first season exteriors—were rough.
“I was like, ‘This is the biggest scam!’” Chalamet says, over dinner earlier this month. “I don’t see any point in lying about it. I got to college, and many people around me were so happy to be done with high school. I didn’t feel that way. I met my best friends in high school, and I loved high school. I get to college, and it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s a lot of anxiety that you have.’ And you’re on your own, you have to figure it out.”
Luckily, nearly a decade later, she can laugh about her college years. Yes, maybe college is a scam! (Doctors, ignore that last sentence.) The actress runs me the numbers on how expensive each hour of class cost at Bard while we both sip ciders—“hopping on the happy-hour train,” as she says. College fades into the distant memories in the 30-year-old actress’s life, only returning to her in flashbacks as she puts the finishing touches on Season 2 of the HBO Max comedy.
In fact, she’s having a flashback to her younger years here, at this posh SoHo diner, right now. Our waitress reminds Chalamet of a happier moment in her life, when she was in school at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts in Manhattan. At LaGuardia, she never sat still. She would go to the Met every Sunday, full of energy and attitude. Back then, she thought eBikes and girls with Brooklyn accents—like our current waitress—were so cool.
“I love her, because she has a New York accent,” Chalamet says of our waitress, reminiscing about cool girls from her high school. “I don’t know why. She’s very hot.”
Going to college, after loving high school so much, felt especially dire; at one point, she had a roommate that had sex in the room while she was still there. But she also knows she’s not alone in having a sub-par time during what’s meant to be the best four years of your life. Plenty of other folks wrestle with the culture shock of college: How do you live with three other girls you’ve never met before? How do you balance a sex life, a social life, and academics, while also making sure that you FaceTime mom once a week, because you miss her more than anything? Young women can now turn to Chalamet for support. Because in Sex Lives of College Girls, she, too, is struggling, just as she did in real life.
In the first season of the show, her character Kimberly Finkle arrives at the prestigious (and fictional) Essex College with no sexual experience. She has a boyfriend who “looks like Shawn Mendes”—really, think Seth Rogen; still cute—but they’re waiting for the right time to finally have sex. Her random roommates, on the other hand, have plenty of sex and go to a whole flurry of parties, which they drag Kimberly to as well. They all face sexual frustration, academic troubles, and other brutal college experience, but all in good humor!
“I’m vicariously living through this character, who is really knowing how to do college,” Chalamet says, recalling her own experience.
In fact, Chalamet almost embodies this nearly-sexual character now, attempting comparing her post-collegiate life—which she spends rotating through Paris, where she now lives, as well as Los Angeles, where she shoots the series, and her hometown of New York—to human genitalia. While New York is an “very imposing, erect city” with “tall erections all over the place,” Paris feels more “voluptuous” and “very feminine.” LA, meanwhile, is “the estranged aunt.” She doesn’t ascribe a sexuality to LA. It’s just the estranged aunt.
Hopping around from city to city has defined her post-grad life. Though Paris has her heart, and Los Angeles has the benefit of being… the estranged aunt, I guess… you can’t take New York out of Pauline Chalamet. She was born and grew up in the city, and went to college just upstate. While she moved to Paris after college, she continues to come back home for work and other obligations. Even her HBO Max comedy—which is set in Vermont—has an air of New York City to it. Sex Lives of College Girls has hints of Sex and the City: Not only does it have a similarly risqué name, but the show also has four female leads (Chalamet, Amrit Kaur, Reneé Rapp, and Alyah Chanelle Scott) with impeccable chemistry.
“I had a conversation with New York yesterday. Literally. Out loud,” Chalamet says. “When I land in New York, I have this thing where sometimes I’ll see the skyline and I’m like, ‘Oh, God. Here we go.’ But then, sometimes, I see the skyline, and it’s saying, ‘Welcome home.’ You never know how it’s going to be. And yesterday it was a welcome home.”
She gave New York a big hug back. “You were pretty nice today, New York!” she recalls saying to the city after grabbing dinner with her dad that evening. “Thank you. I know you’re upset that I criticize you a lot.”
There are some unforgiving aspects of both college and New York, but thanks to growing her comedic acting chops on The Sex Lives of College Girls, Chalamet has a sense of humor about it all. Still, as much as she wants to chat with our waitress again, she refuses to order the cheesy French fries, which she fears will “make her ill.” Though she doesn’t elaborate on her worry, there are some lessons, from college food halls and greasy spoons in New York City, you learn the hard way.
Setting up this interview was a nearly impossible feat. On top of Chalamet being incredibly busy (today, she has filmed guest appearances on The Sherri Shepherd Show and The Drew Barrymore Show, and shot something for TikTok; now she’s meeting with me, and after, she’ll go live with The Recount on Instagram), my emails won’t break past the spam filter. The subject line, which boasts the word “sex,” shoots all of my emails straight to junk.
The great equalizer: Not only am I having trouble with The Sex Lives of College Girls, but so are Chalamet, her manager, her publicists, and most likely, even co-creator Mindy Kaling. But the show begs to be talked about, so all of us find ways to swagger on out of the spam box and out to drinks. (Eventually, Chalamet’s publicist and I start using the subject line “Pauline Chalamet/The S*x Lives of College Girls,” like we’re in middle school.)
“The title was a way of being quite broad, while insinuating that there was maybe something raunchier than your average comedy,” Chalamet says. “Because you’re in this machine that is hoping to prolong itself—film is final, and television is not. When I think of film titles, there’s something in the film that the title is about. The film has an ending. With television, you don’t have that ending. You have to find a title with a theme that your show is about.”
Enter The Sex Lives of College Girls, which—shocker!—has a lot of sex and a crew of the most lovable college girls ever. When Chalamet initially read the script (somehow, it got past the spam filter), she uttered “Fuck yes” to herself. She felt an attachment to a particular character: Kimberly, our beloved innocent Arizona gal who nearly flunks out of college the first season because she’s so distracted by sex. Sex, she realizes after losing her virginity, is too good. How can anyone do French homework when there’s a chiseled six-pack waiting for you just across the quad?
“I understood this character,” Chalamet says of Kimberly. “I understood her so well. I was like, I know this girl. I just know how she talks, I know her timing, I know the awkwardness that she lives in.”
But it was Kimberly’s story arc that resonated most with the actress. After sneaking homework answers to her first love Nico (Gavin Leatherwood, who exited the show before the second season), Kimberly loses her scholarship. When we meet her in Season 2, she’s struggling to figure out how to pay for school—and how to tell her sweet parents, who can barely afford vet bills, about what happened.
“We’ve seen class differences in television, of course,” Chalamet says of Kimberly’s financial struggle. “But to see a girl in college interact with people who have more money than her, I lived that.”
Though she does have more sex eventually in Season 2—thank goodness, Kimberly, we’re all rooting for you—Chalamet’s character thrusts herself into the workforce this season. Since losing her scholarship, she spends most of the season devising how to find the $80,000 she needs for tuition. First, she asks her professor to co-sign a loan. That doesn’t work. Then, she takes on a job writing subtitles for an Australian knock-off of Love Island. She can’t understand a word anyone’s saying.
“When you’re privileged and in school, you don’t have to think about those things,” Chalamet says of Kimberly’s storyline this season. “I loved it because, in a similar way as I look at comedy as something that’s quite straight, I loved the idea that you can deal with really important issues comedically.”
But, she tells me, it took her a while to see herself as a comedic actress. Though fans of the show will affectionately shout her now-famous Season 1 line, “No pair of pants should cost more than $40!” at her on the street, she’s still figuring out how to be a funny girl.
“Comedy can feel so naked when you’re not funny,” she says. “I’m not up there being funny or awkward. Everything is sincere. Everything is real.”
But Chalamet is one of those rare gems who can make you laugh without even trying. At the diner, she makes me giggle when she celebrates the fact that we’re both ordering ciders, and even more when she orders my drink for me. This makes me laugh too, probably unintentionally: Chalamet is worried Mindy Kaling and showrunner Justin Noble are going to block her email, because she’s followed up with them 700 times about Kimberly’s arc this season.
Chalamet is humble about her sense of comedic timing. She may not even fully understand it—sometimes, when she watches herself on the show, she doesn’t get why we’re all laughing.
“There are some episodes that I watch and I’m like ‘What are you doing, Pauline? What are you doing? You’re being so weird. You look like a fifth grader who was given a line before the show, and that’s your one line,’” Chalamet says. Again, I laugh when she smirks, saying, “Other times, I’m able to watch and be like, ‘Ohhhh-kay, yeah, I see that.’”
Having seen most of Season 2—I won’t spoil too much, but it does feature an amazing scene in which Leighton (Rapp) walks in on a chipper Kimberly, fully naked in the bathroom at a party, demanding Kimberly’s help with a tricky situation—I have no doubt that fans are going to spend the whole season laughing over Kimberly’s delightful one-liners. Even if Chalamet can’t recognize her own greatness, we all love her and the wonderfully chipper, naive character she’s created.
Even after all the TV talk, it’s clear that Chalamet’s heart actually belongs to film. When I ask her to list some of her favorite recent shows, she only lists two: Friends and The Office, which she loves rewatching. On the other hand, when I ask her to rattle off some of the top films of the year, she can’t stop naming new movies. Most recently, she saw and liked Decision to Leave and The Whale. She really wants to see Holy Spider, which she tells me is playing at the IFC Center in NYC, if I want to see it.
“I was about to say Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, but that didn’t come out this year—I just saw it at the movies,” she says. “I haven’t seen Tár. I have a friend that’s like: ‘I have to talk to you about something in it, you have to see it.’”
She gives me a stunning ode to both Decision to Leave and The Whale—where are her Letterboxd reviews?—and continues to gab about her favorite directors. She loves French filmmakers, spanning from Agnès Varda to Céline Sciamma. Alfred Hitchcock. Andrei Tarkovsky. Wong Kar-Wai. Janicza Bravo. Greta Gerwig really entices her, a connection that seems plausible after her brother (Timothée Chalamet, heard of him?) starred in both Lady Bird and Little Women.
While she worked independently on films in college and has continued to produce micro-budget projects, The Sex Lives of College Girls is really her breakthrough role. Apart from the HBO Max series, she had a small part in Judd Apatow’s The King of Staten Island, where she played Maude Apatow’s college bestie.
“I really do crave experiences working in film, because I cherish and value the relationship between an actor and a director,” Chalamet says. “The directors I worked with in college were great, and I’ve directed a lot of shorts, but I want to work on something that’s a feature where the relationship with this director is being nurtured and is invaluable to the project’s final outcome. That’s what I’ve been craving.”
To top it all off, a day after our chat, Criterion reveals that she visited their famed closet of DVDs, showing off Girlfriends and Day for Night. While she continues to work in independent cinema, both in front of and behind the camera, Chalamet says that, when it comes to TV, she’d prefer to remain an actress—for now.
“I don’t know it well enough. It feels like a very big machine to me,” she says, while applauding all the folks who have made The Sex Lives of College Girls so successful. “The director is there to help you, but television … is really a writer’s medium. It’s less about the director’s thumbprint, like it is in film, and it’s much more about the writers and the writers of the show.”
There is, however, one throughline that connects both the film industry and the TV world, Chalamet says. It’s driving her up the wall. She can’t take it any longer. She’s incensed by the waste and lack of environmental awareness on these sets, especially in the wake of COVID, when reusable masks and plastic water bottles fill trash bins to the brim.
“I am a little alone in my cause for now. But I don’t care,” Chalamet says. “It is [HBO’s] responsibility to make us greener. I will be an advocate for that, but I’m a cog in the wheel. I’m not afraid to speak out about it, but the logistics always seem to intimidate people.”
She suggests I make this the entire backbone of this profile—and while I agree that the environment is a top priority, I figure we need a bit of comedic relief beforehand. Chalamet has a handful of easy fixes for the environmentally conscious-curious. Canned or boxed water instead of plastic water bottles. Stop blasting the air conditioning at the studios to 64 degrees in the summer when it’s 100 degrees outside. Reusable lunch food containers at crafty.
“If we go back for Season 3 [of Sex Lives of College Girls], I will have meetings with people” about the waste issue, Chalamet insists. “If you’re thinking that climate change is political, there’s something wrong with you. It’s not political. We’re so far into it. Now, we have to be working with it and speak up against it. It’s not political to say we’re ‘going green’ on set. It’s the minimum. It might be really uncomfortable at first, but humans are really good at adapting.”
She’s not all talk either; activism is clearly important to her. When we meet, she’s sporting a tee that reads “vote your tits off,” because it’s Election Day. All of her outfits today have been election-themed, she tells me; earlier, she had on another voting-related shirt, and she also wore purple and yellow, the color of women’s suffrage. On Election Day, these little details are not only fun, but also critical. The environment depends on them.
Chalamet vies to decrease carbon emissions and waste on set, join The Recount for her livestream on Election Day, wear her voting-related outfits—but she also has the time for a good laugh, some ciders, and a chat with New York along the way. Her TV show (which, by the way, is also an excellent step forward in portraying the ups and downs of being a women in college, from sexual harassment to UTIs) similarly excels at making us laugh through the pain.
“We don’t really have [another] show like Sex Lives of College Girls that follows four girls through college,” Chalamet says. “Things can be really dramatic during that period of time, and to make a comedy out of it is great. It’s a joy to be a part of that.”
Because when you can’t be nostalgic for the so-called “best years of your life,” what else can you do but live vicariously through a show with an amazing title like The Sex Lives of College Girls? If, that is, you can make it past the spam filter.
For more, listen to The Sex Lives of College Girls’ Amrit Kaur on The Last Laugh podcast.
