How Timothée Chalamet ‘Pushed the Bounds’ to Play Bob Dylan in ‘A Complete Unknown’

ROLLING STONE – The actor and his co-stars take us deep inside the year’s biggest biopic

He’s traveling through the north country today. Eighty miles from Canada, where the winds, it’s been said, hit heavy on the borderline. As his rented Toyota pickup truck reaches a tree-shaded suburban intersection, he kills the engine and bounds out into late-January air. He’s layered a down jacket over a gray sweatshirt, the hood yanked over his mussed brown hair. His destination is a boxy, cream-colored little house on the corner, down a walkway framed by twin shrubs. To its left is a newish street sign: Bob Dylan Drive.

He spent the past hour and 20 minutes navigating an iced-up Highway 53, fishtailing enough between Duluth and Hibbing, Minnesota, to send the insurers of at least two major Hollywood fran­chises scrambling for Xanax. But Timothée Chalamet is on a mission, and this pilgrimage is one of his final quests.

He was supposed to have four months to get ready to play a young Bob Dylan onscreen. Instead, thanks in part to a pandemic and a few Hollywood strikes, he’s had five years. It’s all gone pretty far. He started off hardly knowing a thing about Dylan, and ended up a self-proclaimed “devoted disciple in the Church of Bob,” dropping references to outtakes (1963’s “Percy’s Song” is an obsession) and Dylan-bootleg YouTube channels. “I had to push the preparation, the bounds,” he’ll tell me, “almost to psychologically know I had pushed it.”

He’s been working with a vocal coach, a guitar teacher, a dialect coach, a movement coach, even a harmonica guy. At one point, he wrote out Dylan lyrics on sheets of paper and taped them to his walls. Chalamet brings his acoustic guitar to the singing lessons, where he’ll sometimes, without warning, show up talking in Dylan’s voice. In the film, A Complete Unknown, which opens Dec. 25, we’ll end up hearing Chalamet singing and playing entire songs, for real, live on set. “You can’t re-create it in the studio,” he argues later. “If I was singing to a prerecorded guitar, then all of a sudden I could hear the lack of an arm movement in my voice.”
Continue reading