Timothée Chalamet’s Mom Takes Us Apartment Hunting

It’s a rainy, gray March afternoon, not the optimal time to see a midtown apartment 17 floors above the Times Square M&M’s store. “It normally gets great light,” Nicole Flender says to the potential buyers, an Italian couple looking for a Manhattan pied-à-terre. They peer out the unit’s windows, a giant neon Krispy Kreme sign shining through the fog. Flender cheerfully explains the building’s friendly rental policy and that the price, $949,000, is good for the market. “This would be a great investment,” she says to the Italians, who seem to have no idea that this petite UGGs-wearing real-estate agent is Timothée Chalamet’s mother.

Flender has been selling real estate with Corcoran for nearly a decade, ever since her husband, Marc Chalamet, a French journalist who now works for the U.N., spotted a Groupon deal for discounted courses at the New York Real Estate Institute. Flender was working as a dance teacher in New York City public schools at the time, and her children — by that point working, but not famous, actors — had left the nest: Timmy was about to audition for Call Me by Your Name, and his elder sister, Pauline, was at acting school in Paris. At Corcoran, the manager interviewing her was skeptical. She needed to be able to network in this business. Who did she know?

Plenty of people, Flender tells me, after she sees off her clients with an “arrivederci ” and we settle into an oversize leather love seat in the building’s lobby. Flender’s first listing was a coup: the newly vacant $1.5 million apartment of Jerry Bock, the Broadway-musical composer famous for Fiddler on the Roof (her New York accent comes through on the r’s in “Jerry”). She got it through connections that long predate Timmy and Pauline’s success. Flender’s father, Harold, was a comedian and novelist whose book Paris Blues was adapted into a film starring Sidney Poitier. Her mother, Enid, was a Broadway dancer. Her brother, Rodman, was a child star who became a writer and director. Both she and her brother commuted by subway to La Guardia High School. In the ’70s, their family was among the first to move into Manhattan Plaza, the subsidized-housing complex in Hell’s Kitchen where the majority of tenants had to be performing artists, through the city’s Mitchell-Lama program. Their neighbors included the then-30-something Larry David, who lived next to a comedian named Kenny Kramer, the inspiration for the Seinfeld character.

Flender went to Yale, then danced after graduation on tours of Hello, Dolly! and A Chorus Line. Eventually, she got her master’s at NYU in French literature and lived in Paris, teaching English as a second language. Afterward, she worked in a call center selling skin-care products. “I was good at sales,” she says. She compares the hustle of meeting clients and getting referrals in real estate to the hustle of meeting choreographers and directors and getting acting jobs: “You have to be personable and like talking to people. It’s kind of like putting on a show.”

She and Chalamet got married in 1985 and rented an apartment in midtown. Soon after Pauline was born, Flender got off the wait list for a coveted apartment at Manhattan Plaza and the family moved in a few floors above her mother. This meant that her kids were able to have the same kind of city childhood that she and her brother did, commuting to La Guardia and doing homework between dance lessons and casting calls. For a while, Flender was a Tony voter through her leadership position in the Actors’ Equity union, and Timmy and Pauline spent school nights watching shows in Broadway theaters.

As they got older, Pauline started attending the School of American Ballet and Timmy began getting acting gigs on shows like Law & Order. But there was no way Flender was going to become a momager. She was still working herself — teaching dance, writing for a few performing-arts magazines, and acting occasionally. Luckily, Enid was able to take Timmy to auditions and even to North Carolina to film Homeland. “It really did take a village,” Flender says. There were a few times when she had to step in on her kids’ behalf, Momma Rose style, like when Pauline was downgraded from a principal to a background actor while dancing on the set of Royal Pains. Flender called SAG-AFTRA and got the show to change her contract: “She got the residuals for years.”

As children laden with bags from the M&M’s store clog the street in front of the lobby’s double doors, I ask Flender if she has seen the viral clip of Timmy talking about being a Mitchell-Lama kid on Theo Von’s podcast (“Oh yeah, the restaurant stars or whatever?” Von says in response). She hasn’t, but she seems pleasantly surprised that anyone cared or even knew what the program was. “People liked that? Oh, good,” she says, smiling. Having known nothing else, Flender is matter-of-fact about her powerhouse acting family, with its multiple generations of working-class performers, whose primary form of privilege is their subsidized New York housing: “We knew that they were talented, but we always just thought, We’ll see.”

Of course, Flender’s children have long since graduated from the Mitchell-Lama income caps. Timmy recently bought a house in Beverly Hills priced at $11 million. “Did he ask for my advice? No,” she says, laughing. “He said, ‘Guess what? I bought a house.’” It’s on the same coast where his girlfriend, Kylie Jenner, lives. (“I have to say she’s lovely,” Flender says of Jenner. “She’s very nice to me.”) Pauline, who had a child last year, bought an apartment in Paris. Flender says she won’t be following either of them around; she has no plans to leave Manhattan Plaza or the city, where she still substitute-teaches in public schools and recently acted in a short film about a bird-watcher in Central Park. “Would you like your mom to be trailing you everywhere?” she asks. “I like being able to go visit them.”

Plus she still likes selling real estate. She recently helped a client flip an apartment on 33 Riverside Drive, where the Gershwins once lived. She’ll take rentals, too; she has a one-bedroom condo in Hell’s Kitchen for $4,000 a month right now, and she’ll occasionally help out friends of Timmy’s and Pauline’s. And she’s close with her fellow Corcoran agents — a group of Manhattan moms, many on second and third careers. (In November, she took a few of them to a special screening of A Complete Unknown.) Still, “I do get some weird calls and emails asking for autographs and things like that,” she says. “One guy called me to sell a very nice apartment on 53rd Street. I said, ‘How did you find me?,’ and he said, ‘I like your son’s movies.’”