Oscar Isaac Thought Timothée Chalamet Portraying Bob Dylan Was 'Really Bad Idea' Until He Heard the Actor Sing
Oscar Isaac is explaining how his 'Dune' costar Timothée Chalamet convinced him he could portray Bob Dylan when he was skeptical
Oscar Isaac was not sold on Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan until he heard the actor sing Dylan's songs.
At the 2024 Gotham Awards in New York City on Monday, Dec. 2, Isaac, 45, took presented Chalamet, 28, and A Complete Unknown director James Mangold with the Visionary Tribute award.
As he recalled working with Chalamet on the 2021 movie Dune: Part One, he said Chalamet first told him and costars Josh Brolin and Steven McKinley Henderson about A Complete Unknown while they were spending time in Chalamet's trailer on set.
"He starts telling us about his next project he was working on. A movie with the wonderful director James Mangold about a young Bob Dylan coming to New York in 1961," recalled Isaac, who once portrayed a folk musician in 1961 New York in the 2013 movie Inside Llewyn Davis. "And my first thought, 'It sounds like a really bad idea.' I mean, it's Dylan. It's the holy of holies for me. It just didn't sound right."
"Then Timmy takes out his guitar — not a good sign — and starts playing 'Girl from the North Country,' " Isaac added. "Now, this is a song I know deeply, to my core, and Josh, Steven and I, we're not your average Timmy Chalamet groupies. We're grizzled movie vets. We've seen some s---."
Macall Polay/Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
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Even though Isaac estimated Chalamet "had just started learning the guitar" and how to sing at that time, he felt the actor approached Dylan's music "not as if he was learning something new but as if he was remembering something he'd always known, just rediscovering it."
"I look over at a wide-smiling Steven, and he just says, 'Yeah, baby,' and the three of us just sat there watching this young man connect with something mysterious," he added. "And that is the nature of folk music. To quote the great Llewyn Davis, 'If it never gets old and it was never new, it's a folk song.' "
Macall Polay/Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Timothée Chalamet in A Complete UnknownChalamet has been open about spending five years preparing to play Dylan, now 83, in the upcoming A Complete Unknown, which covers Dylan's early rise to fame and decision to begin playing electric guitars in the mid 1960s.
In Isaac's estimation, Chalamet and filmmaker Mangold, 60, captured Dylan's essence in the new movie, which is in theaters Dec. 25.
"James and Timothée have approached this work with a mix of humility and irreverence, just like Dylan approached the Great American Songbook, probing familiar forms to rediscover the truth of the present moment," Isaac said during his Gotham Awards speech as he brought the filmmaker-actor duo to the stage.
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