He may have just secured a couple of box office smashes with his two latest movies, the sci-fi epic Dune and Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, but it’s come to our attention that, should the acting dry up, young Timothée Chalamet has another career path he could follow: Xbox control modder.
Following a recent in-depth investigation by Vice, it has come to light that for a period in 2008, Timmy was running a YouTube channel called ModdedController360. The channel, which is still active and boasts around 21,000 subscribers, houses three videos where a faceless young man talks about the Xbox 360 controllers that he has modded by repainting them, a couple of which were also for sale.
“What’s good YouTube, this is ModdedController 360 with the controller of the week,” the disembodied voice of a young man says in the video as he shows off his Xbox controller “Here’s a red tiger. Started it yesterday, finished it today. It looks nice. It looks sexy.”
There has been speculation since 2018 that Timmy was the man behind the channel after fan account Chalametuniverse used their expert detective skills to link another of the actor’s old YouTube accounts to ModdedController360. “I’m pretty sure those are his fingers and his beautiful voice,” they wrote on Instagram. “Also Timmy has a little scar in one of his fingers and you can see it in these videos too!”
For their investigation, Vice took things further, using forensic evidence (aka comparing details from the videos to pictures from Timmy’s Instagram account) to deduce that ModdedController360 was indeed the Academy Award star. Like Chalametuniverse, they also compared the scar on the actor’s finger to the scar of the finger of the boy in Xbox controller videos.
The mystery of ModdedController360 was finally put to bed, however, following a recent interview where Mr Chalamet confirmed that the YouTube account did, indeed, belong to him.
“I had a YouTube channel that people found,” Timmy says. “I used to paint mod controllers. I did three. I spray painted them on my pillow. I would open them up and paint them and I would charge people $10.” Ever the industrial little lad, Timmy says that he made a grand total of $30 from his little enterprise, although his family weren’t too thrilled with the spray paint that he got all over the house.
Timmy hasn’t commented on whether controller modding is still a pastime he partakes in, although it’s not hard to imagine him sitting down between scenes while filming to take apart an Xbox controller and start tinkering away. Regardless, hopefully those three lucky souls who own ModdedController360’s designs have held on to their Xbox controllers as they’ve probably increased in value since all this has come to light. And should he decide to stop acting and get back into the modding game, we know a guy who sells old Xbox controllers really cheap. Either way, long live ModdedController360.