Timothée Chalamet is set to transform into Bob Dylan in the highly-anticipated James Mangold-directed biopic, A Complete Unknown. The Hollywood A-lister will portray Dylan as the 19-year-old musician who descended upon New York trying to make a name for himself, up until the time he shocked the music world by going electric.
As part of the role, Chalamet had to learn guitar – but not only that, he had to learn the nuances of Dylan’s playing and his distinct approach to the instrument.
“It’s a lot of downstrokes, and his strumming pattern in the early ’60s was very different. You know, I’ve heard some people say his guitar playing sort of peaked in the ’80s and ’90s, that he was getting better,” Chalamet tells Zane Lowe in a new interview with Apple Music.
Mastering Dylan’s voice and guitar playing was no mean feat, and it was one the actor found challenging and, at times, frustrating. However, he describes how it finally all came together when he performed Song to Woody from Dylan’s self-titled 1962 debut album.
“We did these pre-records – but I’m not playing the guitar on the pre-records – with Nick Baxter, who is a super-talented musical supervisor, and I would butt heads with Nick a lot. The guitar sounded really friendly. It’s hard to get that sound. I mean, he was playing on a guitar that was basically falling apart, you know,” Chalamet explains.
“It was Song to Woody, which is one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs ever [when things clicked]. 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 [one of the most significant figures in American folk music] and Pete Seeger [American folk singer-songwriter and activist], and I did it live. And it clicked, it went great.”
He continues, “And I’m making mistakes in the guitar a little bit here and there. You can kind of fill those in after. [But] I went home and I wept that night, not to be dramatic, but it’s a song I’ve been living with for years and something I could relate to deeply.”
After filming the scene, Chalamet felt “it was the most dignified work” he’s ever done, and while he admits that dignity “might be a weird word here”, he feels “humbled” that he and the team “were just bringing life to a thing that happened 67 years ago”.
A Complete Unknown is slated for a December 25 release in the States, and stars Chalamet as Dylan, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, and Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie.
