Timothée Chalamet recalled this week that an agent once told him he needed to gain weight. Although strange at the time, memories of the experience helped Chalamet prepare to play Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s upcoming film Completely unknown.
“If I audition Maze Runner or divergentwhen I showed up, all kinds of things popped up and the feedback was always, ‘Oh, you don’t have the right body,’ Chalamet told Zane Lowe in an interview released on Tuesday. “One of my agents called me and said, ‘You’ve got to gain weight,’ basically, not aggressively, but you know.”
While Chalamet may not have become the face of any of the dystopian teen dramas of the 2010s, his career has been pretty smooth. Now, as he prepares to release Completely unknown The next month, the actor said his experience wasn’t that different from Dylan’s.
“I’ve had a life experience where I wouldn’t say it’s weird, but I can relate to some of the things [Bob Dylan] Experienced,” Chalamet said. “Bob wanted to be a rock star – Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Elvis – it was that, depending on your point of view, that crunchy pop, saturated rock music, you know, For kids in the late 50s, again, I wanted to be a big movie actor.
Like the uber-popular folk musician, Chalamet said he eventually realized he needed to build his career with an eye toward something that was personally meaningful to him. “I found my way into these very personal films,” dune said the actor. “for [Dylan]that’s folk music. He couldn’t keep a rock band because they would all be hired by other, richer kids in Minnesota. So for me, it’s about looking for a very personal film – CAll me named after you or beautiful boy or lady bird or “Little Women”, “Miss Stevens”, “Hot Summer Nights”. These are smaller budget, but very…I don’t know how else to say…. A personable movie that begins in this theater space. This is where I found my rhythm, my confidence, my flow, whatever you want to call it.
Elsewhere in the interview, Chalamet said he worked with a harmonica coach for five years before filming the film. Thereafter, he “took Bob’s footsteps through Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin” and Minnesota, where Dylan was born.
Despite his intense training, Chalamet said the film was not meant to be an accurate representation of the musician’s life. “This is interpretive. It’s not definitive,” he said. “That’s not true. That’s not what happened. It’s a fable.
Completely unknown Opening in theaters on Christmas Day.
