Bob Dylan has praised the casting of Timothée Chalamet as his younger self in the new biopic A Complete Unknown, calling him a “brilliant actor.”
In the film from Logan director James Mangold, the 28-year-old actor portrays Dylan, now 83, as a young folk artist arriving in New York City in 1961 through to his contentious embrace of electric rock’n’roll in 1965.
Writing on X/Twitter, Dylan said: “There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what a title!). Timothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.”
He added: “The film’s taken from Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric — a book that came out in 2015. It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early ‘60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you’ve seen the movie read the book.”
Last month, Chalamet revealed he was moved to tears after performing in character as Dylan.
Speaking on the Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music 1, Chalamet explained that he sings and plays guitar in character as Dylan throughout the film as he recalled his first experience of performing on set.
“It was ‘Song to Woody,’ which is one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs ever,” said Chalamet. “It was the first one we shot in the movie. You couldn’t do it to a playback because it’s such an intimate scene. It’s in a hospital room with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. And I did it live.”
Chalamet remembered being nervous about the performance, saying: “I’m making mistakes in the guitar a little bit here and there, but you can kind of fill those in after.
“I went home and I wept that night, not to be dramatic, but it’s a song I’d been living with for years and something I could relate to deeply. And I also felt, I come back to this word a lot, I felt like it was the most dignified work I’d ever done.”
“And dignity might be a weird word there, but it felt like so dignified and humble, we’re just bringing life to a thing that happened 67 years ago. I went, oh, of course, Leo and Daniel Day-Lewis. Of course, they do these biopics. It kind of all clicked because there’s dignity to it. You’re not pulling out thin air, this happened.”
Dylan has become uncharacteristically active on social media in the last few months, recently posting about his appreciation of a Nick Cave lyric.
