The career moments Timothée Chalamet compared to Bob Dylan

Posted On November 19, 2024November 19, 2024

In the 2007 biopic I’m Not There, the character of Bob Dylan was played by six actors: Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Ben Wishaw, and Marcus Carl Franklin. Timothée Chalamet, though, will tackle the challenge of becoming music’s biggest enigma by himself as he plays the young Dylan in James Mangold’s upcoming A Complete Unknown.

Chalamet recently sat down with Zane Lowe and Apple Music to discuss how he made his way into the role and the similarities between Dylan’s early career and the actor’s own. “Call Me By Your Name, Ladybird, Hostiles and Beautiful Boy I shot in a nine-month stretch, or something,” Chalamet said. “And that’s before I did any sort of like, press or anything related to it. So the window was pure. The way Bob made The Bob Dylan LP or Freewheelin’, that’s how I look at it. You know where his success was kind of going like that.”

“Now the turning point for Bob, for me, the way I interpret his career, or a symbol of a turning point, is this thing, this Civil Rights award called the Tom Paine award he got next to James Baldwin and he was drunk when he was there,” the actor added. “There’s no audio that exists of it, but there’s a speech he gave you can read, where clearly he’s had it with sort of being deified. Now, I was never deified, but I could equally relate that I was like ‘Well, I’ve done this thing’, but when Denis Villeneuve knocks on the door about Dune, or I get the opportunity to play Willy Wonka or something, that was Bob wanting to be in a rock and roll band up top.”

If Chalamet continues to mirror Dylan’s career throughout his own, then we can expect to see plenty of left turns and surprises along the way. We may be heading towards a second career peak, following a meteoric rise and prolific early streak of successes. Before long, we may see a trilogy of deeply religious movies, a troubled middle period which is later re-evaluated and reassessed as being better than it was thought at first, and a late-career string of masterpieces which stand up alongside and occasionally eclipse the quality of the early work, all against a backdrop of relentless and never-ending live theatre work which challenges and reimagines his screen performances. Maybe we can expect some re-makes of classic pre-war films and even a Christmas movie at some point, too.

Dylan himself is no stranger to the silver screen. He is the central focus of DA Pennebaker’s cinéma vérité masterpiece Don’t Look Back and its less well-known and less well-regarded follow-up, Eat the Document. He starred in and scored Sam Peckinpah’s troubled but brilliant Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid before experimenting with the form in his own movie, the epic 1978 picture Renaldo and Clara.

In the 1980s, Dylan wove classic lines of Humphrey Bogart dialogue through his Empire Burlesque album, and, in one of his greatest forgotten songs, re-wrote the 1950 Gregory Peck western The Gunfighter as ‘Brownsville Girl’ on Down in the Groove. In the same year, he appeared in Hearts of Fire, a much-maligned movie about a fading rock star. For a long time, Dylan’s last screen role was a cameo in the 1990 Dennis Hopper / Jodie Foster film Catchfire, until he co-wrote and starred in the incredible 2003 film Masked & Anonymous.

And while he has not appeared in any fictional roles since – unless you, understandably, include his portrayals as himself in the 2005 and 2019 Martin Scorsese films No Direction Home and Rolling Thunder Revue – Dylan has at least been involved with Chalamet’s upcoming film.

In his interview with Lowe, Chalamet said that Dylan “approved the script, he made modifications to the script”, not that Chalamet knew it at the time of shooting. He added, “There was one I was saying to James Mangold, ‘this is good, man. When did you come up with this?’ He goes, ‘Bob put that in’”.

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