Timothée Chalamet says Oscar Isaac and Christian Bale taught him to "guard" his process

While preparing for his upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet wanted to make sure he was “worthy” of playing Bob Dylan, as he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe last week. “People are deeply protective of Bob Dylan and his music legacy… because it’s so pure in a sense, and they don’t want to see a biopic mishandle that,” the Dune actor elaborated in a new cover story for Rolling Stone. That’s a lot of pressure for an actor to take on—especially one that, by his own admission, hardly knew anything about the musician when he was approached for the project five or six years ago. (Don’t worry, Dylan-heads; Chalamet is now a self-proclaimed “devoted disciple in the Church of Bob.”) 

Luckily, Chalamet gained some great mentors over the years to show him how to fine-tune his own performance as well as create a tone of hyper-focus and commitment for his co-stars on set. “The great actors I’ve worked with, Christian Bale on Hostiles… or Oscar Isaac on Dune, were able to do that, and guard their process, particularly for something that’s really like a tightrope walk,” he said. 

For Chalamet, that guarding manifested in remaining “in his own world… in a way that I think Bob (Dylan) often was as well,” his co-star, Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez), said. “It wasn’t so full-on,” she continued. “It wasn’t ‘Don’t look him in the eye’ or anything like that.” Still, the two actors were both committed to remaining in character even between takes. Once, she recalled, they were chatting when Chalamet’s Dylan voice began to slip. “And at that point… I think we both were just like, ‘Nope, no more talking!’”

Edward Norton, who plays Pete Seeger, added that Chalamet’s distraction-free process was “relentless,” with the actor allowing himself “no visitors, no friends, no reps, no nothing.” Thankfully for everyone working on that set, this wasn’t anything resembling a Jeremy Strong and Brian Cox sparring over Method Acting situation. “I agreed totally—it was like, we cannot have a fucking audience for this,” Norton continued. “We’ve got to believe to the greatest degree we can. And he was right to be that protective.”

For Chalamet, all of this was about returning to a time before his dating life made national news and fans set up lookalike competitions. “It was something I would go to sleep panicked about… losing a moment of discovery as the character—no matter how pretentious that sounds—because I was on my phone or because of any distraction,” he explained. “I had three months of my life to play Bob Dylan, after five years of preparing to play him. So while I was in it, that was my eternal focus. He deserved that and then more.… God forbid I missed a step because I was being Timmy. I could be Timmy for the rest of my life!” 

A Complete Unknown premieres December 25 in theaters.