Timothée Chalamet once had an agent tell him he needed to gain weight, the actor recalled this week. Though weird at the time, memories of the experience helped Chalamet prepare to play Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s upcoming A Complete Unknown.
“If I auditioned for The Maze Runner or Divergent, things of that variety that were popping when I was coming up, the feedback was always, ‘Oh, you don’t have the right body,” Chalamet told Zane Lowe in an interview released Tuesday. “I had an agent that called me and said, ‘You got to put on weight,’ basically, not aggressively, but you know.”
Though he may not have become the face of any dystopian teen dramas that peppered the 2010s, Chalamet’s career turned out to be just fine. Now, as he prepares for the release of A Complete Unknown next month, the actor says his experience felt not too dissimilar to Dylan’s.
“I’ve had a life experience, I won’t say it’s weird, but I can relate to some of these things [Bob Dylan] went through,” Chalamet said. “Bob wanted to be a rock ‘n’ roll star — Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Elvis Presley — that was the sort of, depending on your point of view, the sort of rice crispy pop, rock & roll music that was saturated, you know, marketed to kids in the late ’50s. Equally, I wanted to be a big movie actor.”
Like the uber popular folk musician, Chalamet said he ended up learning that he needed to build his career with an eye for what spoke to him personally. “I found my way into these very personalized movies,” the Dune actor said. “For [Dylan], it was folk music. He couldn’t keep a rock ‘n’ roll band because they would all get hired by other kids that had more money, literally, in Minnesota. So for me, it was finding a very personal style movie — Call Me By Your Name or Beautiful Boy or Lady Bird or Little Women, Miss Stevens, Hot Summer Nights. Those were smaller budget but very… I don’t know how else to put it…. personable movies that started in this theatre 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 in the lead-up to the film. After that, he “retraced Bob’s steps through Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin” as well as in Minnesota, where Dylan was born.
Despite the intense training, Chalamet said the movie was not about recreating the musician’s life exactly. “This is interpretive. This is not definitive,” he said. “This is not fact. This is not how it happened. This is a fable.”
A Complete Unknown releases in theaters on Christmas Day.
