Timothée Chalamet on becoming Bob Dylan for ‘A Complete Unknown’

In partnership with Searchlight Pictures

Typically, when actors are preparing to play a real person, they might have a few months to find their voice, work out how to look more like them, take a dive into their history. Timothée Chalamet spent five years gradually becoming Bob Dylan for A Complete Unknown, steeping himself in his music and history; breaking him in until Dylan fit him like an old leather jacket.

• READ MORE: Soundtrack Of My Life: James Mangold

“I had the time to put the 10,000 hours in,” says Chalamet, “which in a three-month, four-month period you really can’t… There wasn’t a deadline on it. I wasn’t learning for anyone else. I was learning for myself.” The result is an extraordinary performance, for which Chalamet has already been nominated for a Golden Globe, in a film that gets under the skin of one of the most intriguing geniuses in music.

From almost the minute he arrived in New York in 1961, Bob Dylan was an object of fascination. Barely into his twenties, he was already a songwriter of preternatural artistry. His songs managed to speak to something personal within everyone and, as the USA was going through seismic change, somehow capture the mood of much of the nation.

Tunes like ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ soundtracked the Civil Rights Movement and campaigns against nuclear disarmament. Dylan became a folk hero. But not by his own choosing. A Complete Unknown is the tale of a man trying to write the story of who he is, while those around him – hell, the whole country – try to tell him who they need him to be.

Yet when director James Mangold began tackling Dylan’s life, he started as if nobody knew who Dylan was. It was the same approach he took to Walk The Line, his Oscar-winning 2005 movie about Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. “I try to make it like it’s a fiction film,” he says. “I don’t mean that I take a liberal attitude with the facts, but that I want the narrative to stand on its own merits. You have to earn the audience’s attention just as you would if something were a complete confection.”

“I had the time to put the 10,000 hours in” – Timothée Chalamet

Mangold began working on A Complete Unknown in 2018, after producer and Dylan’s long time manager Jeff Rosen optioned the book Dylan Goes Electric!, by Elijah Wald. It follows five years in Bob Dylan’s life, from a pilgrimage from Minnesota to New York to visit his hero, folk singer Woody Guthrie (played in the film by Scoot McNairy), through his years as a young idol of the folk scene, through to a pivotal concert at the Newport Folk Festival where Dylan debuted his new electric sound, upsetting his folk community but thrilling the world.

“There is so much in this story that is really juicy,” says Mangold. “It’s not just because it’s telling this great story about Bob Dylan – which is a huge reason – but there’s also so much about the tribalism between different kinds of music. There are cultish aspects, like ‘you can’t be with us and do that music at the same time’. That still exists now in music and I thought it was so interesting.”

Fearless approach

Mangold immediately knew who his Dylan had to be: Timothée Chalamet. “Timmy is fearless,” he says. “There’s something very mercurial and interesting about him that I found very ‘Bob-like’. His energy is braided with Bob’s. That’s what I’m always after.”

Before Chalamet was offered the role, he was, by his own admission, not a Dylan scholar. “A friend of my father’s had a striking portrait of Bob on his wall, which was the extent of my knowledge about Bob,” he jokes. Chalamet wound up with far longer to prepare than he expected – the global pandemic and strikes in the movie industry delayed shooting from 2020 until 2024 – which gave Chalamet an extraordinary amount of time to prepare. He read and watched everything he could and found a man who has always done things his own way, whether people liked him for it or not.

“Someone said the other day that [Dylan] was ‘someone who doesn’t give a fuck about other people’,” says Chalamet. “I don’t think it’s that. He was concerned about his art, and never pretended not to be.”

“You could see bits of Timothée in there and it was blurred with Bob” – Elle Fanning

There are, in fact, three significant people Dylan cares about in this movie. There’s his first girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a surrogate for Dylan’s real love Suze Rotolo, a woman who loves him before the world has any idea who he is. There’s Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), a folk superstar with whom Dylan forms a powerful, tempestuous connection. And there’s Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), a man who feels folk music down to his bones.

Seeger’s a hugely popular singer in his own right, and one of the heads of the Newport Folk Festival. He wants to see Dylan use his talents in the folk world, not the rock ’n’ roll world that is making folk look like a relic. They’re all drawn to Dylan’s unique brilliance, and will be hurt by him in different ways.

All three actors were astonished seeing Chalamet transform into Dylan. “It wasn’t just that he was doing a ‘version of Bob’,” says Fanning. “You could still see bits of Timothée in there and it was blurred with Bob. And he’s so spot on with the voice. It’s unbelievable.”

“I almost feel like it’s a disservice to even talk about how he played the role,” says Norton. “I don’t want to demystify it. He was phenomenal. I just loved watching it.”

For all three, it was watching Chalamet perform as Dylan that proved truly transporting. “My first day on set, we were in a theatre and I think it was the first performance he was doing in front of an audience, singing ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’,” says Fanning, a huge Dylanophile. “I was in the audience. Timothée comes out and none of us knew what to expect. He gives us, like, a full concert as Bob. He sang songs that aren’t in the movie. He was ad-libbing as Bob. It was extraordinary. There were tears in my eyes. In that moment, I knew what this movie was going to be.”

Confidence to perform

Every note sung on set, by every performer, was live. No miming to the original vocalists. No miming to their own pre-records. All live. In front of crowds. “We’re making a movie about a form of music whose entire thing is authenticity,” says Mangold. “It’s not the production value. It’s not the orchestrations. It’s just the voice and the guitar. The level of exposure, the level of nakedness of the performance, is so great that it needs all the actor’s tools to make it feel truly alive.”

The cast worked with vocal coach Eric Vetro, who got Austin Butler into singing shape for Elvis, to help them match the voices of the real-life singers and build the confidence to perform. For Monica Barbaro, it was a rewarding, but deeply nerve-wracking process. And this is from a woman who spent months doing stunts in fighter planes when she played a pilot in Top Gun: Maverick.

“Having to sing and play guitar live was more terrifying to me than anything I did in Top Gun,” she laughs. “Yes, my life was more at risk in Top Gun, but it feels so vulnerable to sing in front of people. My respect for musicians was already through the roof, but now it’s even higher.”

Seeger was a very laid-back performer, guiding cheerful singalongs while strumming his five-string banjo. If his gig looks relaxed in the film, that’s not how it was to perform for Norton.

“Any time you do something big like that, it’s a long day,” he says. “I got up the next morning and my back was killing me. I ran into Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers, who’s an old friend of mine. I said, ‘I don’t know how you’re able to do this’. He said, ‘Are you crazy? I do it for about two-and-a-half hours. I don’t do it for 15!’”

As alien an experience as it was, all the cast massively valued the opportunity to perform for real – Barbaro has kept up her guitar playing because she loved it so much– and Mangold says it was clear from almost the first day, watching Chalamet sing, that doing everything authentically would be the making of the film.

“The first musical scene we shot was Bob singing for Woody Guthrie when he’s in hospital,” says Mangold. “It’s just Timmy and his guitar. He hit this note for four or five bars. It was just something he decided to do, that only existed in that take. It’s so beautiful. We never would have got that if we hadn’t made this in the way we did.”

A little less unknowable

For all those performing in A Complete Unknown, by the end of shooting, Dylan was a little more familiar. But Dylan will never be entirely knowable. And that is his enduring appeal. He writes songs that can cut right through your heart and give voice to an emotion you could never fully describe, but he never gives all of himself away. Through the film he lets down, and sometimes devastates, those who love him most. He does things that enrage people who want to idolise him. But he never changes who he is, because he doesn’t seem to know any other way to be.

“It’s someone being true to their art even at the consequence of losing their popular appeal,” says Chalamet. “To the point of having stuff thrown at them.” But he just keeps on doing what he believes in, until people eventually come around to loving it with him.

“There’s all the stardom and the mystique around Bob Dylan,” says Mangold. “But I don’t actually view him as so enigmatic. People want to know, ‘Why are you like that?’ And I’m not sure he can ever offer an answer. I’m not sure there is one.” But the beauty of his story is that his ability keeps inviting the question of how one person has this world-altering talent; that there might be a neat, perfect answer somewhere, blowin’ in the wind or otherwise.

‘A Complete Unknown’ is out January 17 in UK cinemas