Timothée Chalamet refused to see friends or visitors for months while playing Bob Dylan
Chalamet stars as the great ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ singer-songwriter in James Mangold’s ‘A Complete Unknown’
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Your support makes all the difference.Timothée Chalamet was so committed to staying in character as Bob Dylan for his forthcoming movie A Complete Unknown that he refused to see visitors and friends while filming.
The Wonka star, 28, leads James Mangold’s new biopic about the “Blowin’ in the Wind” singer-songwriter based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! about the controversy surrounding Dylan’s switch to electrically amplified instrumentation in 1965.
It also features Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (loosely based on Dylan’s early girlfriend Suze Rotolo), Monica Barbaro as Dylan’s ex, Joan Baez, and Edward Norton as the late Pete Seeger.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, ahead of the film’s release on December 25, Norton revealed just how “relentless” Chalamet was when it came to staying immersed as Dylan.
“No visitors, no friends, no reps, no nothing. ‘Nobody comes around us while we’re doing this,’” the Fight Club actor recalled. “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***ing audience for this. We’ve got to believe to the greatest degree we can. And he was right to be that protective.”
Barbaro also remembered Chalamet stayed “in his own world” on set, “in a way that I think Bob often was as well. And it was actually really conducive to the dynamic between Bob and Joan.”
She recounted a moment when she and Chalamet were speaking between takes, and Mangold interrupted to inform Chalamet that he had lost his Dylan voice. “And at that point,” Barbaro said, “I think we both were just like, ‘Nope, no more talking!’”
Addressing his method of acting, Chalamet gave credit to former co-stars like Christian Bale (Hostiles) and Oscar Isaac (Dune), who he says would “guard their process, particularly for something that’s really like a tightrope walk.”
He added that remaining in character returned him to his acting roots, “when people aren’t 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.”
“It was something I would go to sleep panicked about: 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,” Chalamet explained.
A Complete Unknown, which is set to be released in the US on December 25, and in the UK on January 17, sees Chalamet do his own singing and guitar playing.
“I had three months of my life to play Bob Dylan, after five years of preparing to play him,” he said. “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!”
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