Timotheé Chalamet’s “relentless” devotion to playing Bob Dylan revealed
Timotheé Chalamet‘s devotion to playing legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in the upcoming biopic, A Complete Unknown, has been revealed by a co-star who claimed Chalamet refused to see friends and visitors while shooting the movie.
The upcoming biopic, which will be released on Christmas Day in the United States and January 17th, 2025, in the United Kingdom, also features Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a character based on Dylan’s girlfriend in his early years, Suze Rotolo. Furthermore, Monica Barbaro appears as his ex-girlfriend and fellow folk singer Joan Baez, meanwhile, Edward Norton portrays singer Pete Seeger.
In a Rolling Stone interview with the cast, it was revealed that Chalamet mostly kept to himself on set. He didn’t want anything to distract him from inhabiting Dylan as fully as possible. Furthermore, even the film’s call sheets called him “Bob Dylan” instead of his real name.
Norton marvelled at how “relentless” Chalamet was in his performance, and he revealed that he agreed with the young star’s somewhat unusual provisos for staying in character.
The Fight Club star said, “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 fucking audience for this. We’ve got to believe to the greatest degree we can. And he was right to be that protective.”
However, Barbaro was quick to clarify that Chalamet’s technique wasn’t quite “method acting” in the way most people think of the craft these days. She assured viewers, “It wasn’t so full-on. It wasn’t, ‘Don’t look him in the eye’ or anything like that. We said hi, gave each other a hug. I was like, ‘I just saw Dune!'”
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Barbaro felt that Chalamet’s method-adjacent tactics worked perfectly for the relationship they were trying to portray between Dylan and Baez. He stayed in his own world, which was often how Dylan behaved in real life, and Barbaro said, “It was actually really conducive to the dynamic between Bob and Joan.”
Amusingly, Barbaro admitted there was one time that Chalamet let his guard down more than usual and chatted with her about their everyday lives between takes. When director James Mangold heard their conversation, though, he told Chalamet that his Dylan accent was in danger of faltering. Both stars immediately knew their little chat was over. She laughed, “At that point, I think we both were just like, ‘Nope, no more talking!'”
Chalamet was reticent to describe his process in too much detail, but he did admit that he was keen to return to the style of acting he used in the nascent days of his career. He said he missed the days when no one in the media or online was curious “about how you go about your work because they don’t know who you are yet. Which is how the experience was for me on Call Me by Your Name.”
Ultimately, the Wonka star had one simple goal. He said, “I had three months of my life to play Bob Dylan, after five years of preparing to play him. So while I was in it, that was my eternal focus.”
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