Timothée Chalamet Hasn't Met Bob Dylan Yet Despite Role in Biopic: He 'Retreated from the Public Eye'

Timothée Chalamet is playing Bob Dylan in a biopic, but on a personal level the two are complete unknowns. 

“I never met him,” said the actor, 28, in an interview on The Zane Lowe Show released Nov. 11 on Apple Music 1. Chalamet plays a young Dylan in A Complete Unknown, writer-director James Mangold’s take on the legendary singer-songwriter. 

Noting that the “Blowin’ in the Wind” singer is now 83, Chalamet said, “He’s sort of retreated from the public eye. Never met him. Would love to!”

Asked for the extent of his interaction with Dylan, the Dune star laughed, saying, “I’ve seen him live.”

The reclusive songwriter was distantly involved with his depiction in A Complete Unknown, however. “He approved the script, he made modifications to the script, there are lines that are his in the script that I relished,” revealed Chalamet. 

“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,’ ” added the star. “He has the Bob-annotated script. I want it.”

A Complete Unknown also stars Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie and more.

To bring Dylan’s early years to life, Chalamet committed to playing and singing his music live on set, throwing out hours of pre-recorded audio they had planned for lip-synching, he said on The Zane Lowe Show. 

It did not "make sense" for Chalamet to mimic Dylan’s exact moves or voice, he said. "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."

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Upon breaking into the music scene with “The Times They Are a Changin,'" Dylan “had some instinct to not let people in at the beginning,” noted the Oscar nominee. 

And much like 1960s-era Dylan differed from “larger-than-life figures” like Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger or Jimi Hendrix, Chalamet said he could relate to his feeling out of place.

“When I look at my contemporaries now, I don’t really see myself in the mirror. I don’t say that to put myself down, I just don’t. When I watch group interviews for movies I put out and they cut to other castmates, I think they’re much better spoken. They can flip the Hollywood thing on way better than I — I feel like I stumble over my words and can’t really get it across.”

A Complete Unknown is in theaters Dec. 25. The second part of Chalamet’s interview on The Zane Lowe Show will be released in December.