Timothée Chalamet on Why He Didn't Take 'Good Friend' Austin Butler's Elvis Approach When Playing Bob Dylan (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Timothée Chalamettook an unconventional approach to playingBob Dylan.

PEOPLE has an exclusive clip of the actor, 28, talking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe about how his vocal and physical transformation into the “End of the Line” singer for the upcoming biopicA Complete Unknowndiffered from other actors likeAustin ButlerandNatalie Portman.

“Somebody once said to me, you can’t make a movie about a painter because it’s not interesting to watch paint dry,” Chalamet says at the top of the video. “Bob has that element because he’s not one of these forward-facing musicians.”

Timothee Chalamet on ‘The Zane Lowe Show’.Chad Griffith/Apple Music

Chad Griffith/Apple Music

He continued to say that, for his portrayal of the famed musician, it did not “make sense” for him to mimic his every move with planned choreography.

Speaking about Portman’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the2016 historical dramaJackie, Chalamet says, “Natalie Portman does a sequence in [Jackie] that is step-for-step exactly what Jackie did. That was sort of my aspiration – my layman’s aspiration going into Bob.”

But through trial and error, theDunestar decided that taking that approach was not going to work out.

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He recalls seeing a vocal coach and working with a dialect and movement team, saying it was “all this stuff that I saw my good friend Austin Butler crush it with onElvis.“However,he eventually realized, “Wait, I gotta do none of this because this is not my style.”

Timothee Chalamet with Zane Lowe on ‘The Zane Lowe Show’.Chad Griffith/Apple Music

More importantly, it wasn’t Dylan’s style either.

“Bob did not have a vocal coach,” Chalamet says. “He had two bottles of red wine and four packs of cigarettes. There’s no way to impersonate that.”

The upcoming biopic follows Dylan’s arrival to New York City at age 19 in the early 1960s. “As he forms his most intimate relationships during his rise to fame, he grows restless with the folk movement and, refusing to be defined, makes a controversial choice that culturally reverberates worldwide,” the official synopsis teases.

Timothee Chalamet in ‘A Complete Unknown’.Searchlight Pictures/Youtube

Searchlight Pictures/Youtube

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PEOPLEexclusively debuted a behind-the-scenes videoof Chalamet talking about the authenticity of his portrayal of the legendary musician in October.

“It was important for me to play and sing on set because it was in the spirit of the movie to do it live,” Chalamet said in the video among clips of him performing Dylan’s hit songs “The Times They Are a Changin'” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”

A Complete Unknownis in theaters Dec. 25. The first part of Timothée Chalamet’s interview onThe Zane Lowe Showwill be available on Monday, Nov. 11 onApple Music 1, with the second part releasing in December.

source: people.com