While Timothée Chalamet won’t say he went full method during the shoot for the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, the 28-year-old Dune star literally says he lost sleep over fears that he would lose even a “moment of discovery of the character.”
In a new Rolling Stone cover story, Chalamet describes the five years of prep work he did to play the folk rock icon in the film due out on Dec. 25, which included subsuming his not insignificant Hollywood star reality in order to crawl into the enigmatic singer/songwriter’s skin as a young man on the cusp of greatness.
“Losing a moment of discovery as the character — no matter how pretentious that sounds — because I was on my phone or because of any distraction. I had three months of my life to play Bob Dylan, after five years of preparing to play him,” Chalamet told the magazinbe. “So while I was in it, that was my eternal focus. He deserved that and then more.… God forbid I missed a step because I was being Timmy. I could be Timmy for the rest of my life!”
Instead of the four months of prep Chalamet was supposed to have for the shoot, he ended up getting nearly half a decade to ruminate over the part due to the COVID-19 pandemic and last year’s Hollywood strikes. In that time, he went from a hip-hop head who knew very little about Dylan to a self-proclaimed “devoted disciple in the Church of Bob,” working with vocal, harmonica, guitar and dialect coaches so that he could credibly sing and play entire songs live on set.
His co-stars in the film all attest to the intense focus Chalamet brought to the role, with Oscar nominee Edward Norton — who plays Dylan’s hero folk singer Pete Seeger — calling the star’s performance “off-the-charts great.” Elle Fanning, 26, a fellow child actor who’s been a Dylan fan since director Cameron Crowe introduced her to the Bard’s work when she was 13, said playing Dylan’s early love interest activist Sylvie Russo was an emotional experience.
“We were in an auditorium, and I was sitting amongst all these background artists,” she said about tearing up the first time she heard Chalamet sing on set. “[Director] Jim [Mangold] would let Timmy come out and give the crowd a whole concert. He was singing ‘Masters of War’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,’ and I was like, ‘Jesus.’ All of us were kind of shaking, because it was so surreal hearing someone do that. So perfectly done, but it wasn’t a caricature. It was still Timmy, but it’s Bob, and this kind of beautiful meld. That gave me chills.”
The actress also recalled how after the gobsmacking performance she heard some extras having a debate about whether Chalamet was really singing or lip synching. “I tapped them on the shoulder and I was like, ‘He is singing. I know he’s singing!,’” she said. And though she knew Chalamet well after they played a couple in the 2019 film A Rainy Day in New York, Fanning said she was warned early on that her co-star might “keep to himself” on set except in scenes with her.
That might explain why Monica Barbaro, who plays another Dylan paramour, folk singer Joan Baez, wasn’t surprised when she met Chalamet a week before shooting began and he was already dressed in his character’s clothes. “I had a lot of friends who were like, ‘Have you met him yet? Have you met him?,’” she said. “But it just felt like the right thing to wait and just meet in the context of these characters… the way she saw Bob.”
Though Chalamet didn’t go so far as to insist the cast and crew refer to him as “Bob,” Barbaro said he did stay “in his own world” in the same way that the real Dylan seems to inhabit a different universe than the rest of us. “He was relentless,” said Norton of Chalamet’s focus on set. “No visitors, no friends, no reps, no nothing. ‘Nobody comes around us while we’re doing this.’ We’re trying to do the best we can with something that’s so totemic and sacrosanct to many people. And I agreed totally — it was like, we cannot have a f–king audience for this. We’ve got to believe to the greatest degree we can. And he was right to be that protective.”
Chalamet still has not met or talked to the real Dylan, but he’s well aware that playing the mythical musical hero who was considered the Chosen One of folk rock is in keeping with one of his other recent roles as the golden child Paul Atreides in two Dune films. “The massive difference in the framing is, for Paul Atreides, the destiny is preordained, and it’s part of his resentment for his status. He feels like it had nothing to do with him, in a sense. And it’s a great source of existential strain,” said Chalamet. “And for Bob, it’s the mischievous joy in knowing, yeah, your talent, your special ability is your own doing, your own gift from God in a sense. I think there’s probably always a pride in that for him.”
Okay, but why, then, is Chalamet drawn to these voice of a generation savior roles? “Hey, man,” he laughed, “they’re finding me. Not the other way around.”
