You would think you would do a show called The sex life of the students would be fun and messy. You would be wrong. The new series of HBO Max, created by Mindy Kaling, was shot at the height of the pandemic; its stars, who play the titular freshmen, had to audition via Zoom for a job where they were constantly separated by two-meter-long sticks and prohibited from socializing.

“It was not glamorous at all”, confides one of them, Pauline Chalamet. “We were all in the same hotel, but all on different floors, and the COVID team told us over and over, ‘You can’t hang out. “But it’s like we’re all in LA, we don’t know anyone. So we would go out on the patio, there was a campfire, and we would sit six feet apart and we played card games, masked to try to get to know each other.

So Chalamet made get to know your costars Amrit kaur, Renee Rapp, and Alyah Chanelle Scott-as well as Kaling, who co-wrote the series with Justin noble. “I’ve obviously admired his work before,” she says. “But seeing her in action, which meant very focused on what was going on and quick-witted and able to listen. . . That’s really what I admired about her presence on set, is that when she was on set, she was a very well managed ship.

Filming his first TV show in the midst of the pandemic while working with his pro hero helped Chalamet get in the right frame of mind to play Kimberly, a naive promotion major whose upbringing in a small town in the classroom. Arizona’s lower average certainly didn’t prepare her for life at prestigious Essex College. “My way in [Kimberly] had she arrived at an institution where she didn’t feel out of place, ”says Chalamet, who attended Northern New York State University of Liberal Arts, Bard. “When I arrived it was so clear to me that there were those who had money and there were those who didn’t. And for me, this non-place has stayed with me all my life. “

Of course, Chalamet’s education diverges enormously from that of his character: “I grew up in New York. It was anything but safe. Chalamet grew up in Manhattan Plaza, a subsidized housing unit for artists in Hell’s Kitchen, where she got used to hearing her neighbors sing opera or play the piano during resident rehearsal hours. The love of art “was in my family, and it was also really in the building I grew up in,” says Chalamet. “It was still there.”

She devoted most of her childhood to the arts, attending the School of American Ballet at the age of 8 before performing with the New York City Ballet and the American Ballet Theater. Following in the footsteps of his mother and uncle, Chalamet studied drama at LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts in Manhattan, where his younger brother, Timothy, would also register. “By the time I graduated from high school, I was in a phase of rebellion against everything I had known growing up,” says Chalamet. She actively tried to avoid anything “too artistic” about Bard: “I was keen to become a lawyer.

But while working part-time at the International Crisis Group, a non-governmental organization that works in partnership with the UN, Chalamet found herself looking for something more. “I was also floating. I didn’t really know. I loved studying, but at the same time, it was like something was missing in my life, ”she says. She therefore decides to overlap her two passions with a double specialization in political studies and theatrical performance.

Post-graduation, Chalamet says, is when she really found herself. “It was after college that I started telling myself that you have to persevere, and that you have to sit down in discomfort and leave all the doubts and questions that arise. . .they have to sit around you sometimes and you can’t answer them, ”she says. And there were a lot of questions that tormented Chalamet when she moved to Paris, where she would spend the next seven years of her life.

“I just didn’t really know what I was going to do,” she says. “It would give me a lot of anxiety. I just remember, I was probably 23 or 24, I was like, ‘Okay. This is really crap right now. And I think if I let it go and accept that this is crap, maybe some answers will start coming to me. They eventually did, but it’s really hard to sit still in this discomfort. I have amazing friends and a great family, but it feels like you are alone in these feelings. It might have been helpful to realize this earlier, she said. “I wish that earlier in Kimberly’s age someone would have said, ‘You are alone. You may feel like you’re not because you live in a dorm, but you are alone. ‘”