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 Timothée Chalamet handled his role as Bob Dylan with care.

The 28-year-old actor transformed into the iconic musician for the upcoming film, A Complete Unknown—where he was encouraged to put his own spin on the role.

“Harry Shifman, one of my earliest mentors,” Timothée said in an exclusive clip from the Nov. 11 interivew on Apple Music’s The Zane Lowe Show, “when I was taking on this role, he said, ‘Don't worry about being Bob Dylan because people can go see Bob Dylan, they can watch the early footage or go see him now because he still tours.’”

He continued, “This is about not only myself interpreting Bob, but Edward Norton interpreting Pete Seeger, Monica interpreting Joan Baez and Boyd Holbrook interpreting Johnny Cash in this moment in the '60s where American culture was a kaleidoscope and Greenwich Village was a kaleidoscope, the way culture still is now too, but without being a history teacher, that was the beginning, personalized music, stuff with intention, stuff with poetry, it all started there in the movie.”

The biopic focuses on Dylan's early days as a musician in New York City, including the Minnesota native's iconic performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. There, the mostly acoustic singer-songwriter rocked out on electric guitar and shook up the folk music scene.

And that’s where Timothée really had a change to shine as the “Blowin’ In The Wind” singer.

When it came to the full performances, the Wonka star prerecorded a number of tracks but advocated to use his own singing voice as he felt the professional recordings often felt “too clean” for the film. And for one particular scene that sees Timothée performing in a hospital room, the intimacy of doing the song live on camera paid off. 

“When I did 'Song to Woody,' which is a song I could relate too deeply, it went great.” he said of filming the sequence. “Then I was like, ‘all right, I'm going to fight this war until the rest of the movie.’ 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 continued, “And then, Jim would say, to console Nick or myself, ‘Treat that as like a work session, you were practicing to do it live.’ Because 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.”

Aside from singing, Timothée said that he mastered Dylan’s imperfect way of playing the guitar and singing—something he said fans should look for when they see the film.

“It's confined and contrived,” he said of the Grammy-winning musician’s playing style. “And you can also hear that my arm's not going the way you don't hear Bob's arm going, but it's doing something to his voice.”

A Complete Unknown premieres in theaters on Dec. 25, and don’t miss Zane’s sit down with Timothée on Nov. 11.

 

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