Timothée Chalamet didn’t sit down with Bob Dylan before playing the famed singer in the upcoming biopic “A Complete Unknown.”
In fact, the two still haven’t met each other.
“I never met him,” Chalamet, 28, said on “The Zane Lowe Show” on Monday while promoting his movie about Dylan’s life that comes out on Christmas.
The “Dune” star added that Dylan, 83, has “sort of retreated from the public eye.”
“Never met him. Would love to!” Chalamet said.
James Mangold’s movie follows Dylan’s early years in New York City and his rise to fame in the 1960s.
The film co-stars Elle Fanning as Dylan’s then-girlfriend Sylvie Russo, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash.
Chalamet confirmed to Zane Lowe that Dylan had very little involvement in the making of “A Complete Unknown.”
“He approved the script, he made modifications to the script, there are lines that are his in the script that I relished,” Chalamet said. “There was one I was saying to Jim Mangold, ‘This is good, man. When did you come up with this?’ He goes, ‘Bob put that in.’ He has the Bob-annotated script. I’m gonna ask Jim for it. He’s not gonna give it to me, but I want it.”
The Oscar nominee explained that he’s “so prideful” that he gets to play Dylan and tell his story on the big screen. He also shared that he didn’t try to mimic Dylan’s voice for the role.
“Bob did not have a vocal coach. He had two bottles of red wine and four packs of cigarettes. There’s no way to impersonate that,” he noted.
Looking back on his first experience of performing on set, Chalamet explained how emotional he got after singing “Song to Woody,” which he called one of his “favorite Bob Dylan songs ever.”
“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,” he said. “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.”
Mangold, 60, previously told Rolling Stone that he thought Chalamet’s performance was “miraculous.”
The director also recalled that when Dylan asked him what the movie would be about, he told the legendary musician, “It’s about a guy who’s choking to death in Minnesota, and leaves behind all his friends and family and reinvents himself in a brand-new place, makes new friends, builds a new family, becomes phenomenally successful, starts to choke to death again — and runs away.”
Mangold shared that Dylan replied, “I like that.”
“A Complete Unknown” will be released on Dec. 25.