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Timothée Chalamet has revealed he was moved to tears after performing in character as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s new biopic about the influential singer-songwriter’s early years.
Chalamet, 28, plays Dylan as a young folk artist arriving in New York City in 1961 through to his contentious embrace of electric rock’n’roll in 1965.
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 and 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.”
Chalamet went on to say that by the end of the production, he could “probably play 30” of Dylan’s songs, although only “13, let’s say,” were needed for the film.
He pre-recorded several songs in a studio with Edward Norton, who plays Pete Seeger in the film, but said that those recordings were eventually ditched in favor of live recordings made on set. “The metaphor was like I was throwing this delicately made china on the ground each time we didn’t use a prerecord, something we had crafted in LA for six months, but there’s not a single prerecord in the movie,” he said.
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“All of a sudden, Edward Norton would say too, something clicked in my voice, there was a certain rawness. Those microphones, those old school microphones we were using when playing in concert halls, I could get the strum better and I could get how he was singing.”
Fans have responded well to the clips of Chalamet singing in the film’s trailer, with one commenting: “He sounds just like him!”
A Complete Unknown is set to be released in the US on December 25, and in the UK on January 17.
