Timothée Chalamet’s red-carpet ride adds to Lime bikes’ ‘fashion credentials’
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Actor’s premiere entry shows how the electric rental bikes have shifted gear from everyday commuter transport. Wobbling along on a scuffed-up, muddy Lime bike is a journey that will be familiar to many commuters. But riding one to to the premiere of your new Oscar-tipped film? Less so.
![[Lime rental bikes parked in a row on a pathway in a park; another lies on its side on a heap of autumn leaves and more are seen by the railings outside the park]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9026cfafb8b68dae4db67c30e7a1f5979bad82ff/0_200_6000_3600/master/6000.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
That Timothée Chalamet turned up to the London red carpet of A Complete Unknown on a Lime is a new high for the clunky electric bikes, which in recent years have shifted gear from quotidian to cool. Riding down the red carpet, struggling to get the unwieldy machine on to its stand and then apparently standing to pay for his ride, Chalamet brought Hollywood-level attention to the transportation company. Even the idea of the actor being fined £65 for parking in the wrong zone – an easy pitfall, given the sometimes confusing no-parking zones system – added to the charm.
![[Shoppers pass Lime bikes on the packed pavement outside the department store]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/bc600fcd1d9df07f995e34d0d5b7b0bda1a3989c/0_365_5472_3283/master/5472.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
While the company says it’s too early for it to be able to measure business impact, and is unsure who issued the fine, given its penalty structure runs from £2 to £20, the scene was undeniably valuable exposure. Ellie Bird, Lime’s UK brand leader, says it wasn’t staged: “We had no idea it was going to happen … I was on the train home when I saw the first picture. I sent a message to my colleague saying, ‘Isn’t this good/funny AI’, before we realised it was actually real.”.
Some PR experts argue that it may have been more planned from Chalamet’s side. “Ultimately Timothée is in the middle of a press tour, and everything that he does is very constructed, even if it may seem organic and ‘random’,” says Sasha Mills, of the communications agency Pacer. She points to the live stream last year of Chalamet dancing wildly to the Black Eyed Peas. “It was designed to seem chaotic, but a team of over 10 people worked on that,” she says. “Given that the director who worked on the live stream, Aidan Zamiri … posted a series of BTS stories around the bike on the day, I would presume that this was a constructed moment designed to amplify the noise around the premiere in a London-specific manner.”.
