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

Timothée Chalamet took an unconventional approach to playing Bob 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 biopic A Complete Unknown differed from other actors like Austin Butler and Natalie 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."

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 the 2016 historical drama Jackie, 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, the Dune star 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 on Elvis." However, he eventually realized, "Wait, I gotta do none of this because this is not my style."

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. 

The movie also stars Edward Norton as musician Pete Seeger, as well as Boyd Holbrook, Dan Fowler, Norbert Leo Butz and Scoot McNairy. The film is directed by Walk the Line filmmaker James Mangold, who cowrote the script with Jay Cocks.

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PEOPLE exclusively debuted a behind-the-scenes video of 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 Unknown is in theaters Dec. 25. The first part of Timothée Chalamet’s interview on The Zane Lowe Show will be available on Monday, Nov. 11 on Apple Music 1, with the second part releasing in December.