Five minutes of Walk Hard scared the Bob Dylan out of Timothée Chalamet
In a new interview with Zane Lowe, Timothée Chalamet pays tribute to the alpha and omega of music biopics.
Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures/Screenshot: YouTube
Your honor, may Timothée Chalamet approach the bench. Chalamet is guilty as charged, having committed one of the worst crimes an actor can do before starring in a biopic: He watched five minutes of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. The results are unsurprising. The film scared the hell out of him.
Speaking to Zane Lowe, Chalamet revealed that he “made the mistake of watching five minutes of [Walk Hard]” before starting A Complete Unknown and went, “Oh my God, I’ll never be able to do this.” Walk Hard, Chalamet says, “brutally” mirrors the beats of Walk The Line, James Mangold’s 2005 Johnny Cash biopic. However, using the Walk Hard example, Chalamet reveals how this movie differs from other biopics. “This movie does not demystify the cult of Bob,” Chalamet says, compared to Walk The Line, which is a “little more clear from a narrative perspective.” Still, he’s a little concerned that the ever-contrarian Bob Dylan thinks the movie “must be a piece of shit.”
In the realm of modern music biopics, all roads lead back to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Since its 2007 release, Cox has made the subgenre a non-starter for many. Critics, audiences, and Cox obsessives love to point out how much biopics like Back To Black, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Elvis repeat the beats of Jake Kasdan’s masterful parody. It’s the highest honor a spoof can attain: A joke so successful that it renders its target powerless.
Did Chalamet and Mangold duet in ways that make audiences feel good? Did the wrong son die? We’ll find out on December 25 when A Complete Unknown hits theaters. Let’s hope there’s a scene in the movie where someone finally asks Bob Dylan why he sounds so much like Dewey Cox.
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