Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met will play a young Willy Won­ka in a new prequel

Timoth­ée Cha­la­met is an actor of great ver­sa­til­i­ty, or at least that’s what his recent résumé would have us believe. He broke out in 2017 as a moody, intense heart­throb in Lady Bird and a moody, intense lovelorn teen in Call Me By Your Name, then had a ban­ner 2019 as a moody, intense Prince Hal in The King and a moody, intense gen­tle­man caller in Lit­tle Women.

He’ll pre­sum­ably bring his moody inten­si­ty and intense mood­i­ness to the unex­pect­ed role of Willy Won­ka, in light of today’s announce­ment that he’ll por­tray the can­dy mag­nate in a new film from Padding­ton 2 direc­tor Paul King. Accord­ing to Dead­line​’s exclu­sive, he’ll appear as Won­ka in his younger years for an ori­gin sto­ry of sorts, a premise that imme­di­ate­ly invites a few dif­fer­ent lines of questioning.

Right off the bat, those famil­iar with the source text from Roald Dahl’s nov­els will won­der if the film will dare explore Wonka’s ori­gins as an impe­ri­al­ist slave dri­ver, gone to Africa to cap­ture and relo­cate the Oom­pa Loom­pa pop­u­la­tion whose labor would prop up his sug­ary empire. While the films with Gene Wilder and John­ny Depp elid­ed this much, Dahl made sure to canon­i­cal­ly spec­i­fy that Won­ka had tak­en up the so-called ​“white man’s burden”.

Alter­nate­ly, will the CGI ghost of Christo­pher Lee return to reprise his role of Wonka’s father, as shown in the Tim Bur­ton movies? On both counts, the answer is most like­ly ​‘no,’ though one thing that has been con­firmed is that Cha­la­met will get to show off his singing and danc­ing skills in a pro­fes­sion­al capac­i­ty for the first time, so, you win some and you lose some.

Details of plot are still up in the air, though the Dead­line item does men­tion that good old Char­lie Buck­et will not have a pres­ence in the new film, with Won­ka tak­ing cen­ter stage. Either way, we’re bound for a return to the world of pure imagination.