Timothée Chalamet: Becoming Bob Dylan | Apple Music

For me, it started with the music. This song, Ballad of a Thin Man, the live version that's in the Scorsese doc, that was my way in. I'm now deep in that church of Bob, and I feel like I got this opportunity to kind of be a bridge to this music. Has better understanding what he went through, has it changed you? Like Bob says at the end of Don't Look Back, I feel like I went through a thing, and it was like a new guiding light to how I want to feel when I work. This theater space, this is where I found my rhythm, my confidence. It all started there. The journey I've been on as an actor, this is like bringing it all back home, no pun intended. You know, the words and songs of Bob Dylan have translated so much of the human experience, there's going to be puns. Some of these iconic songs were written here in New York City, which is where I meet Timothy Chalamet, one of the actors of his generation. Where does that term come from? Probably also New York. In the early 60s, when Bob Dylan arrived, sang these songs and spoke for his generation. What a time, what a story to tell. Bob Dylan then, and Timothy Chalamet now. Well, we're here. It's good to see you, by the way. Nice to see you and meet you. Yeah, nice to meet you too. I feel like I've known you. And I'm so stoked to do this. Same. And I feel like you're talking to a non-musician, so I'm very grateful for that. I don't think so. And we'll get to that. I think you are in lots of different ways. I don't think we could be sitting here having this conversation about this film and your journey thus far if music hadn't played a role in your life. But we'll get to that. I mean, it seems strange to not start with the location. Yes. And why we're here. Because you were excited we were coming here. Yeah. This was actually your idea. Yeah, not only excited. This Manhattan Theater Club, this is not this space, but the space right next door. Yeah. That's where I kind of hibernated and got all these ideas out. And so without this theater, I don't have an acting career. And without your early interviews, in addition to the interviews you have now, you know, I wouldn't have jumped into this either. I know you don't do a lot of this. Yeah. It's not a common thing for you to sit down with all cameras and stuff around. And so we're going to have a good time. I think the work should speak for itself, all the pretentious reasons actors would have. Yeah. But this role, and this guy, Bob Dylan, and this movie, and this is why I like to bring it into this theater space, because I really, I feel like maybe we'll get into it, in the journey I've been on as an actor, this is like bringing it all back home, no pun intended. But I had to will myself into doing this a little bit because the greats like Dana Day-Lewis or whatever, they don't, you don't have to necessarily explain bit by bit how you went about something. But this felt worth it to me. And talking to you felt like the easiest way. And this is the first time, not to be dramatic, it's the first time I talk about this movie or this role with anyone. Not to be cynical, but the further you go along, sometimes your answers can get watered down or you get guarded or defensive if you don't necessarily trust who you're talking to. So this, I put off things because I wanted to make sure the first time I talked about what's been the most special thing, role I've ever worked on, was with someone whose interviews I've watched and seems to get the best out of people, you know. It's cool to hear you say that, like the most worthwhile role. Yeah. And you said this really cool thing to me when we spoke the first time. You said, you know, I think, I hope people, and I feel like people will consider it worthy. But worthy is not a term that gets kicked around when you're talking about numbers or box office. Worthy, you can do something totally worthy and it can only matter to you. The experience I had, I know, was worthy. But I've joked about it with friends just because it was the best experience I've had as an actor or the most rewarding experience I've had. It doesn't really necessarily translate to the effect of it, not only on people, but maybe in the finished product because I've also had more challenging experiences that come out great. So I don't think that things necessarily go hand in hand, but I do feel like that's a good word to revolve around, is worthy here. Because when I got approached with this project five years ago, or six years ago, let's say, this was 2018, and I had just done Call Me By Your Name. Bob Dylan was this name I knew was held in reverence and I knew I was supposed to respect. If you were in the in crowd, that's a name you get behind. But truthfully, I didn't know anything about it. You know, I did a Henry V movie called The King. I thought it was to my advantage. I didn't grow up in England. And I thought that would be my advantage with Bob Dylan if we did it in the first year or two years because I could see online the communities that revered him, how deep that reverence was. And I'm happy it took five, six years because I'm now deep in that Church of Bob. I feel like that's my mission as the next three months to the movie comes out. I feel like I'm in the Church of Bob. I'm a humble disciple. And I feel like I got this opportunity to kind of be a bridge to this music, you know, or this period, this time period. In order to get to this role, which is playing somebody or interpreting a period of someone's life while they're still alive, there's certain disciplines, I think, that hopefully you get to go through to figure out how you do that. Yeah. And I wonder if any of the work you've done previously was of service to that, because I'd imagine it must be one of the biggest challenges for you. You're saying other roles I'd done? Yeah. This was the biggest. This is the biggest because this was taking on someone who maybe to my generation isn't impersonated to death, but to a previous generation is one of the most... I mean, I saw an article I didn't click on, but was like four Dylan impressionists on a complete unknown trailer. So actually when we were shooting the movie, somebody came up to me, one of the actors, and he said, ah, you're doing early 60s, Bob. I do more of a Rolling Thunder review, Bob. First of all, they were really positive on your take, which must've been nice. Yeah, that was really nice. That was hugely nice. And the thing that came out of it was that they wanted you to play Bob. Yeah, it can quickly fall into character. The best feedback I got over the course of the shoot, and this is the first shoot I've really turned my phone off the entire time. You know, I was watching this Ed Bradley interview with Bob Dylan the other day, 60 Minutes, one of his famous 2004 interview, and Bob in it says his connection to his sense of destiny was fragile. I like that he used that word fragile because I always felt my connection to Bob was fragile. I felt like I came into his music at a time where pop culturally, not a lot of people around me were coming to Bob Dylan. So I felt very connected to it. I had to learn how famous he was in the 60s and 70s. At first, I thought he was like the treat I found, you know? And as I began to work on the movie and as everyone has an opinion about Bob, especially an older fan, I felt like my connection to him became fragile and I had to like fiercely protect that and fiercely protect what as an actor or the kind of actor I am is really important, which is a sense of play. I don't like to go about it mechanically and I felt like that was a learning curve on this too. At some point, it was like, I need to worry less about how I think Bob Dylan would eat a bagel and more capture the spirit of this guy because, you know, one can get in their head at the beginning of the process and go, especially with other music biopics, okay, this is about brushing your teeth the way he would brush his teeth but anyway, all that to say, I got this text from Jeff Rosen, who's Bob's manager halfway through the shoot. I didn't even know he came to set. Thank God. Yeah, because that whole day I would have been, yeah, exactly. Essentially, he said like, good on you for capturing the spirit of Bob. He didn't say good on you, man. I'll read it to you because to the Bob purists, they'll go, good on you. Yeah, exactly. But to that point too, Jeff was so effusive and positive and Edward Norton and I were jumping up and down. We went, man, Bob's manager loves it and then we went, oh no, the real Bob's such a contrarian that Jeff's going to go to him and say, this movie looks good and then Bob's going to say, well, it must be a piece of ----. Yeah, totally. But for me, the connection was through the music. At some point, this movie does not demystify the cult of Bob. It doesn't try to go, oh, in fact, it's a challenging story in that way. The Johnny Cash movie that Jim Mangold also directed, the Johnny Cash story is a little clearer from not a tragic perspective but from a narrative. There are beats, clear beats. There are beats, the flashback beats that then walk hard. I don't know if you've seen that movie. Brutally. I made the mistake of watching five minutes of that movie before I started this. Oh my God, I'll never be able to do this. But this is a more, this is kind of a confusing story structure because- Well, he was confusing. He's a mystery. He's still a mystery to me. 61 to 65, the general impression you get if you read the books or you've seen any of the movies or read any of the articles about that time is that he was almost an apparition. And his come up was two years basically from when he got to New York in January 1961 to his point of success was like a two year run. So there isn't the waiting 10 years to come up. That's the other really interesting thing about it is that his is a story of not even reinvention because he didn't even, there's nowhere for him to come from. He literally started fresh when he got to New York. He started there. He was like, there's a great quote in the Martin Scorsese film where he says, I really didn't feel like I had any past that I had to hold onto so I could just kind of start again. That was a huge thing for me. When I came into this music, I felt like self invention, self creation. I grew up 10 blocks from here. I grew up in like the most untethered environment. And I say that affectionately. You know, I grew up in an arts building. You know, there's a rapper from my building named Marlon Kraft. He's got a New Yorker piece on him. If you want to understand the building I grew up in, that's the thing to read. Like Alicia Keys grew up in my building. It's all like, it's an arts, it's like a super untethered, I don't know, but it's a beautiful place. But equally, I culturally came into all the things like Kid Cudi or hip hop, the things that formed me, like any normal kid in that period. And then when I was 23 and when I got to LA and it's not like I hit a wall, but I started, everything's perspective. And I started to see what my perspective was relating to that kind of music or what people's perspective that made that music would be on me as a whatever, as an actor. All of a sudden I was like, oh, this was a means to an empowerment, but it's something I'm, it's fragile for me to relate to or whatever. And then I came into Bob's music and this whole thing of self-invention, which isn't the license we necessarily give ourself in this day and age in 2024. I don't want to speak in broad strokes. I don't think it's anti that, but it's hard. It's more challenging. It's more challenging to get away with or something. Yeah, that aspect of self-invention, it was freeing to me at a time where already in my career, you know, people want to know you as a certain thing. And I'm not saying that as a negative. I'm not saying woe is me. But typecasting is a thing, right? Okay, it's a term. I actually wanted to ask you about this. What does it mean to an actor when that term ever gets kicked around? Even in closed circles where you've had some success doing a certain thing, people like you for that. Is it hard to break away from what people love you for? Most brutally, which I haven't experienced, that's I guess the best example of typecasting would be if you had been on a sitcom that had been hugely popular and you tried to make a dramatic film and people laugh at you on screen because they're only used to laughing at you, right? In my experience, this is where I also felt like I connected to Bob in humility. So I'm not putting myself on a level with him. But there's got to be some common ground. So I understand why you could lay out the groundwork for it as a disclaimer, but... And also I've had a life experience. I don't want to say it's weird, but I can relate to some of these things he went through. So Bob wanted to be a rock and roll star. Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, that was the sort of, depending on your point of view, the sort of like Rice Krispie pop rock and roll music that was saturated and marketed to kids in the late 50s. Equally, I wanted to be a big movie actor, right? I wanted to be, oh yeah. And, but if I auditioned for the Maze Runner or Divergent, things of that variety that were popping when I was coming up, it was like the feedback was always, oh, you don't have the right body. Or I had an agent that called me and said, you got to like put on weight basically, you know, not aggressively, but you know. And then I found my way into these like very personalized movies or something. For him, it was folk music. He couldn't keep a rock and 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 like Call Me By Your Name or Beautiful Boy or Lady Bird or Little Women, Miss Stevens, Hot Summer Nights. Those were like smaller budget, but very, I don't know how else to put it, like personable movies that started in this theater space. This is where I found my rhythm, my confidence, my flow, whatever you want to call it. Doing Prodigal Son here. John Patrick Shanley, that playwright, they gave me the juice. The way LaGuardia gave me the juice when I was starting out in high school. What was the juice? The juice was the confidence, you know. The juice was like just saying you're great. And also at some point that I wouldn't take no for an answer. I felt like it was people with connections that were getting these roles. Prodigal Son was supposed to be a kid with connections. I don't want to say that disparagingly, you know, I say it respectfully. And the audition I had not in this space, but at Manhattan Theater Club in Midtown, I was going nuts, you know. I was like kicking things across the room. And the role was about a sort of a Dylan-esque character, a little more like rageful than Dylan, who, you know, refused to not break out of his shell, you know. And so to have John, the way Harry Schiff met my teacher, LaGuardia, you just have to have people when you're young. And this is where privilege or being in the right place at the right time does play a factor that go, hey, that pat you on the back, you know, that say, do this, basically. And I realized at some point my strength is my vulnerability. Like, you know, I feel like, you know, at 25 or something, you know, similar to Bob, again, you hear stories of people that their upbringings are way more dramatic than mine, you know. And then you start to go like, well, what is my drive? You know, what is, and then like, Bob, my drive is my drive. My thing is my thing. Like, it just is. And at the time you don't know what that is, right? Which is where you're going for the roles that all your peers are going for. Exactly. So you're showing up in these places going, well, I'd like to play that. And someone goes, but you can't. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're not, you're sort of not cut out for this. I was either not cut out for that kind of thing, or I wasn't what was considered like a more vulnerable, I don't know, like something, it was driving me nuts. Call Me By Her Name, Lady Bird, Hostiles, and Beautiful Boy I Shot in a nine month stretch or something. Wow. And that's before I did any sort of like press or anything related to it. So the, so the window was pure. The way Bob made Bob Dylan LP or Freewheelin', that's how I look at it. You know, where his success was kind of going like that. Now the turning point for Bob, for me, the way I interpret his career, or a symbol of the turning point is this thing, a civil rights award called the Tom Payne Award he got next to James Baldwin. And he was drunk when he was there. There's no audio that exists of it, but there's a speech he gave you can read, where clearly he's had it with sort of being deified. Now I was never deified, but I could equally relate that. I was like, well, I've done this thing. But when Denis Villeneuve knocks on the door about Dune, or I got the opportunity to play Willy Wonka or something, that was Bob wanting to be in a rock and roll band up top. You know, I was like, well, Leonardo DiCaprio and those, that's who I initially aspired to be. When that door wasn't open, then I had to go make folk music, basically. You know, then I had to go really hard. It's the opposite of the thing, where that's where I get jealous of musicians, where you can, you know, show up when you want, and the studio is curated. And I've watched musicians record with one engineer in the room, or 30 people in the room, you know. Or take eight years to make an album. Or take eight years to make an album, or eight months, you know, or never put it out, you know. And there's actually a beauty, I think, in a rigorousness on a film set. You are showing up at a certain time, and you got to flip the switch. And I've seen people like Christian Bale. I've worked with people like that, that do it, you know. So you just got to do it, but- That's a whole other discipline. Yeah. When did you start to learn that? The King. That was the, this movie, this Netflix movie, The King, the Henry V movie, that was the switch. And that was also the biggest budget I'd worked at. And I'm a young New York, 22 year old kid at that point, playing Henry V, who was like one of the great. But every movie I've done has reflected some place I'm at in my life in that moment. I've had this weird gift of that. The one exception to that would maybe be Wonka, which is actually a challenge to kind of bring it all back home. That movie was like, I got access to musical theater. Bone, that was really alive to me at 17, 16 at Performing Arts High School. But now is- Yeah. Well, I was like, it was post-COVID and all that stuff. But everything else. So The King or Dune are these roles where they're basically about a circumstance being too great for your youth. And I could relate deeply to that on both of those projects. That was my point of relation. The Bob thing, not to bring it up, I don't want to jump five years, but that was a new challenge of sort of playing a savant and a genius, and how do you do that? Somebody once said to me, you can't make a movie about a painter because it's not interesting to watch paint dry. And Bob has that element because he's not, I like to say about Bob, he's not one of these forward-facing musicians. In other words, it doesn't make sense to match the choreography the exact way it was. There was no choreography. The way the Jackie Onassis biopic, Natalie Portman does a sequence in that, that's step for step exactly what Jackie did. That was sort of my aspiration, my layman's aspiration going into Bob. And at some point, the vocal coach I was working with or the dialect or movement, all this stuff that I saw my good friend, Austin Butler crush it with on Elvis. And I thought, okay. And at some point I was like, wait, I got to do none of this because this is not my style. And B, Bob did not have a vocal coach. He had two bottles of red wine and four packets of cigarettes. So there's no way to impersonate that. But you've got to start somewhere. Yeah. From a process point of view, as someone who has made music and talks about music and loves music, I've got to get into the whole, sort of where it began for you from a performance point of view. Because cats out the bag now, anyone who knows, knows that's you singing and playing the guitar on the trailer. So you do that throughout the film. Oh yeah. And it sounds like everybody does. It sounds like Monica Barbera does as well. Yes, as well. Yeah. So let's just get into the technicalities of that. Yeah. You had a guitar teacher, but not only are you learning how to play an instrument that maybe you had played as a kid or not, but you've got to kind of do it in a way that is reflective of... Of the period. Of the period and of the person. And his particular type of playing is what makes him him. Oh yeah. It's a lot of downstrokes and his strumming pattern in the early 60s was very different. You know, I've heard some people say his guitar playing sort of peaked in the 80s and 90s, that he was getting better, in other words. The two craziest things to me are how people are hard, the purists are hard on his guitar playing or hard on his voice. Because Blind Willie McTell is a good example of that. I can give you a million songs, worried blues or where his voice is beautiful. And it's got that quality. Okay, I got to wrap it around back to your question, but inside Llewyn Davis, which is a sort of Bob Dylan inspired movie, Oscar Isaac, Coen Brothers, it makes this great point that Llewyn Davis is kind of like the struggling folk singer of the whole movie, but he's got this beautiful voice. And the last scene, it's sort of the anti-biopic. He never has his moment of triumph. But the last scene, Llewyn Davis gives this beautiful rendition of the song Farewell. And then in the background of a shot, you see a Bob Dylan figure, Bob Dylan, in shadow singing the song Farewell as well. But it's like got this rust, this like thing that's cutting through. And Oscar makes the perfect expression because all these aspiring folk artists, you couldn't have guessed that this weird thing was going to be the thing that cut through. So anyway, to bring it back to process, for me, it started with the music before there was even a start date. Because this started really for me in COVID, sort of bored. And this song Ballad of a Thin Man, the live version that's in the Scorsese doc, that was my way in. What did you feel when you heard that? I just like, oh, this is rock and roll. And it was this first thing I'm like, wow, is this what the album version sounds like? And then I went to the original and went, oh, cool, he was really just vibing. But at a high level, the way- He's pissed off. He's pissed off and he's edgy. And that live performance, it feels slower. It feels heavier. I don't even know sometimes when the chord changes. It just feels to me like he's just spitting bottle. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's acidic. It's like battery acid. Very acidic. Yeah, and Robbie Roberts and I met years later. He was kind of giving me sort of what the vibe was on that tour. Actually, when I met Robbie, his wife said, what do you think about playing Robbie in a biopic? And I said, well, I'm supposed to play Bob in a biopic. And he went, goddammit, Bob's been beating me to the punch for 35 years, sort of something like that. But when COVID hit and I was just stuck at home, like everyone was stuck at home, I watched Don't Look Back, the D.A. Pennybaker thing, and I started to get into the times they were changing. And I saw this folk music, not as necessarily chirpy love ballads, but then songs like Ballad of Hollis Brown, North Country Blues, or Rocks and Gravel. And I was like, you know, whoa, he's got some edge here. And then there was obviously, there was the Black Lives Matter movement in that moment. And there was like a social crest in America at that time. I found myself going back, not only to Bob's music, but Pete Seeger and all of these folks that in the 60s had gone through a very similar thing. But I felt like I was going back to the 60s, and I went, man, a lot of popular music was that. It was topical songwriting, but the music was the guiding light. It was, you know, and I found myself just pouring over and pouring into his life. And then also admiring that it didn't feel like he was virtue signaling, you know, that it was simply where his art was. That a song like the Death of Emmett Till, he wrote because he wrote, you know. His thing was his thing. His juice was his juice. You couldn't really define it. And at some point, 64, 65, where he felt like he had been pedestaled, he turned his back and like, and what to me is the coolest thing ever, you know. That's why I love Bringing It All Back Home so much, that album, because I know that it got heavier and progressively heavier until he'd made the cut. He'd done it. He'd gone, I'm out. That's my favorite album. That was a moment where he like, in Bellathon there, where he's like, something's going on, you don't know what it is. Like that album is literally- I didn't know what that song was about until maybe six months ago. And I don't want to presuppose, but then I was reading in that book, the sort of, whatever, the ones that explain, that it's sort of about- It's about folks like me. A little bit, a little bit, a little bit. No, a little bit. I mean, and me too. People that are like sort of on the outside and are trying to understand it. That's so funny. Trying to understand it. Yeah, look, I mean, curiosity is a funny thing and you have to walk the line really carefully, right? Like what got me into a chair like this, having a conversation with you is this curiosity that just keeps bigger and bigger and bigger the longer I go. Yeah. Which is beautiful. But you have to be careful with it, right? Because to your point, it's not to be overanalyzed and it's probably not to be analyzed at all. He would say that, you know, Bob's got a great interview with Martha Graham, 80s MTV journalist, where he's describing a German movie that he wanted a music video to be like. And she said, well, what's the movie about? And he's like, well, it's kind of hard to explain. You know, it's kind of like trying to tell someone what's the song about. You know, it's like somebody say, what's the song about? He goes, well, do you listen to it? Yeah. You're like, yeah, I listen to it. Well, that's what the song's about. That's been my whole life. Yeah, exactly. Trying to find out what the song's about. Yeah, yeah. And the gift that he's, you know, the D.A. Pennebaker doc's called Don't Look Back. I feel like he lives it to a T, you know. The No Direction Home, the Scorsese doc, he didn't watch until like three years ago. I mean, Bob has that great quote, where Jeff said, why'd you leave the folk community, man? Why'd you disappear in the 60s? He goes, well, I was sick of people like you. He says to his own manager, you know, which is fantastic. My other favorite quote in that is when they're talking about the booing and he goes, I didn't really get it. I mean, it didn't make me mad though. They can kill you with kindness too. Exactly, exactly. And those kinds of artists, it's hard now. I don't know how someone would do it now musically. You know, those kinds of artists that are sincerely indifferent, because he's 83 now. He's sort of retreated from the public eye. I never met him. You never met him? Never met him. Would love to. Any contact at all? I've seen him live. Okay, okay. But did he contribute? Did he write you a note? Did he send you anything? No, no. That would be the least Bob-like thing ever. He approved the script. He made modifications in the script. He has lines that are his in the script, you know, that I relished. Oh, wow. So you could definitely tell his lines. Well, there was one I was saying to Jim Mengel, the director writer, and I said, this is good, man. I was like, when did you come up with this? He goes, Bob put that in. I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He has the Bob-annotated script. I'm going to ask Jim for it. He won't give it to me, but I want it, you know, with the annotations. He didn't really... There's a song, and I don't want to say what song, but there's a song, like, Jim was looking to cut verses because it's really long in the movie. And I just love it. Like, he went to Bob very nervously and said, like, you know, and then Bob was immediately like, third verse, sixth verse, seventh verse, you know, like, you don't really need those ones. I love it. He's sort of unsentimental about... That's the coolest thing ever, man. Like, he had some instinct to not let people in at the beginning. It's hard because when people say... When people pat you on the back and say, hey, you did a good job, you kind of want to explain why you did a good job, you know? And he just had some insight to not... And that's where I'm so prideful to get to play Bob in the 60s, because you think of Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger or Jimi Hendrix and these sort of larger-than-life figures. To the earlier metaphor about Mazin or Divergent, when I look at my older contemporaries, my contemporaries now, I don't really see myself in the mirror of them. I don't say that to put myself down, but I just don't. When I watch group interviews for movies I put out or whatever and they cut to other castmates, I think they're much, much better spoken. Like, they can flip the Hollywood thing on way more than I... I feel like I stumble over my words and I can't really get it across. So I like... I get to be Bob in that 60s. I'm pretending there's a multiverse that doesn't exist. So the fact that I get to be this guy, you know, and that's where I try to be humble too and check my ego at the door, that in process I never wanted to see myself less when I looked at the monitor in the movie. And I've also... Ever before in this particular role? Yeah, yeah. Why is that? Well, because the guy's so known, you know. When I've seen... When I've had to do ADR, you know, coming to fill lines, I've had to divorce myself. I'm like, this isn't D.A. Pennybaker, you know. This is its own thing now. And it's not an impression Olympics. It's a thing I found early on, you know. It's a process you can't do at home, you know. You got to be on set figuring it out. And like anything, I've always been humble about this. You got to play to the least educated person in the room. Not exclusively, but that's who you're making it for. Because again, someone said to me in Bob's camp, I'm not going to say who, but they said, don't worry about the Bob Dylan fans not liking this. Bob Dylan fans don't like what Bob Dylan does. You know what I mean? Which is a great point. They're like, they haven't liked what he's done since 1966. You know what I mean? So that was sort of a weight off my shoulders. Yeah, it was the most unique challenge I've taken on. But that where my confidence came through is eventually doing all the music live, you know. Maybe it was the least responsible thing on the actor's part because the music exists and the performances exist. So maybe I should have been most concerned about spreading. No, no, no, you're not wrong. Stakes is high for sure. And like when, well, first of all, like you say, Bob is here. Bob is alive. This is interpretive. This is not definitive. This is not fact. This is not how it happened. This is a fable, you know. Exactly. It's not just, it's kind of softball to say what the easiest thing would have been to sing along to the original songs or whatever. But it's a lot to take on because you're not just having to do it faithfully. In fact, you have to do it uniquely. Right. You have to do it in a way that isn't like the songs that exist because otherwise just sing along to those. Exactly. So that's a whole other thing. It's a whole other thing. But when you say uniquely, that's what Harry Schiffman, one of my earliest mentors, when I was taking on this role, he said, don't worry about being Bob Dylan, because people can go see Bob Dylan. They can watch the early footage or go see him now because he still tours. This is about not only myself interpreting Bob, but Edward Norton interpreting Pete Seeger and Monica interpreting Joan Baez and Boyd Holbrook interpreting Johnny Cash, you know, in this moment in the 60s where American culture was a kaleidoscope and Greenwich Village was a kaleidoscope, you know, the way culture still is now too. But it's just without being like a history teacher, that was the beginning. You know, personalized music, stuff with intention, stuff with poetry. It all started there. In the movie, we did these prerecords, but I'm not playing the guitar on the prerecords. With Nick Baxter, who's a super talented musical supervisor and the music, and I would butt heads with Nick a lot, the guitar sounded really friendly. It's hard to get that sound. I mean, he was playing on a guitar that was basically falling apart, you know? And I also felt like my voice had like a baritone. It all sounded clean. And I was doing vocal warmups with Eric Vitro, who's this vocal coach who helped me on Wonka and helped me sing grand on Wonka. And then here, I would listen to it back and I'm like, man, this sounds too clean, you know? And then we would do it on set. It was a song to Woody, which is one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs ever. It was the first one we shot in the movie. You couldn't do it to a playback because it's such an intimate scene. It's in a hospital room with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. And I did it live and it went great, you know? And I'm making mistakes on the guitar a little bit here and there, but you can kind of fill those in after. I went home and I wept that night, not to be dramatic, but it's a song I'd been living with for years and something I could relate to deeply. And I also felt, I come back to this word a lot, I felt like it was the most dignified work I'd ever done. And dignity might be a weird word there, but it felt like so dignified and humble. We're just bringing life to a thing that happened 67 years ago. I went, oh, of course, Leo and Daniel Day-Lewis, of course they do these biopics. It kind of all clicked because there's dignity to it. You're not pulling out of thin air. This happened. When I did Song to Woody, which is a song, like I said, I could relate to deeply and it went great. Then I was like, all right, I'm gonna fight this war until the rest of the movie. And Nick Baxter and I, we're great friends. And he came to my house the other night and we're great friends. But over the course of the movie, it was a constant, the metaphor was like, I was throwing this delicately made china on the ground each time we didn't use a prerecord, something we had crafted in LA for six months. But there's not a single prerecord in the movie. And then Jim would say to console Nick or myself, treat that as like a work session. You were practicing to do it. Because all of a sudden, Edward Norton would say it too. Something clicked in my voice. There was a certain rawness. Those microphones, those old school microphones we were using, we're playing in concert halls. I could get the strum better and I could get how he was singing. There's also something really, really beautiful about the natural, comforting effect of reverb. And the fact that it allows you- And theater has it. Anywhere where you perform, the idea of what you do being wrapped up and nurtured by the natural reverb of the room- Absolutely. Allows you the space to be more open and to be freer in there. Absolutely. You're in a studio meticulously creating prerecorded tracks. Yeah. That feels to me confined. It's confined and contrived. And you can also hear that my arm's not going the way you don't hear Bob's arm going, but it's doing something to his voice. But you're in that club and the cameras are rolling, but who cares about them right now? There's a spotlight on you and you're singing this song. Exactly. And I didn't know of another music biopic where somebody was doing it live. And I'm like a- Jeremy Kleiner is a great producer. He once said to me, you act lyrically. And I love that. I love that. I don't want to understand myself too much as an actor, but it made sense to me. Holding my elbow a different way isn't as interesting to me as capturing spirit and soul and something. And here it was in the music that I could capture the spirit and the soul. I did find my way. And otherwise, you'll see you got to when you're playing Bob Dylan. Otherwise, it's going to be weird to claim you're Bob Dylan and not doing things that were unique to his behavior. That's it. I mean, if you're doing a biopic about somebody, it's because they've had enough of an impact on us all as human beings and on society through the music that they make that we know those songs inside out. So we're right there. Like, shouts to Rami Malek, right? When he did Queen, Live Age. Which is amazing. Amazing. And when I saw that performance of him doing Live Age, that performance of Queen at Live Age, being a boomer, is ingrained in me. So hit those beats. But how do you hit those beats when Bob is, like I said, you can't sing along faithfully to a Bob Dylan song. You just got to sing. Perfectly said. It's sort of blasphemous on its nose. That's why Joel Cohen, before we had Mangold involved, who directed Inside Llewyn Davis, I said, hey, why don't you direct a Bob Dylan movie? And he said, it's impossible. And I said, why is it impossible? He goes, because it's not about a singular moment. How do you, in a two-hour movie, encompass the miracle that is the breadth of what he wrote and how much he got out and the fact that it's like watching paint dry? Because how do you make lyric writing interesting, basically? So tell me, what is the movie about? So the movie is about 1961 and 1965, a young Bob Dylan arriving in New York and how his career took off. It's sort of about the folk community. It's an ensemble movie, right? It's an ensemble. Yeah, it really is. I mean, A Freewheel in Time, which is Suze Rotolo's book. And there was another book, the name of which escapes me, that was less about Bob and more about Greenwich Village at that time. Because Greenwich Village was this artistic community where people were bubbling. And you had people like Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, or Paul Clayton that were like folk stars. But through McCarthyism, folk music got blacklisted in the late 50s. So nobody had cracked through. And rock and roll was seen as this kind of thin music that was- You're not on the picket line with us. Right, yeah, exactly. It was like aimed at teenagers. So the Newport Folk Festival was sort of the Coachella, let's say, for lack of a better metaphor, of the picket line, of pure music, of folk music. And so there was sort of an opening for someone, if not literally a young person, to sort of take over the folk community. The structure of the movie is that Woody Guthrie was dying and that Pete Seeger was sort of the lieutenant and was like a real bonafide folk artist and politically super on the left and of the people. And he was slated to take over the folk community. And out of nowhere, a prophet shows up, that is Bob Dylan, who inexplicably takes over everything at once. And in Bob's words, the songs were coming from God. And the Ed Bradley interview says, I can't do it anymore. So in that period, anyway, and then at the moment of deification, at the moment where he was on top, decided to turn his back on the folk community in one interpretive way. In another way, he just wanted to make the music he wanted to make and became a rock and roll star. Let's say the first rock and roll star at the Newport Folk Festival got booed off stage or like a mixed reaction because he took, let's say, what was considered pop music, whatever, rock and roll, and he played it at what was supposed to be a space of purity. At a time when he was considered to be the one person through all of this blacklisting, this fear mongering, this McCarthyism, there's no place for politics and music. If you step on that stage and you speak about government and we speak about our actions, we will make it very tough for you to reach your audience. That was legitimately happening. He was bigger than that. So they saw him as someone who was going to be able to destroy that methodology. Right, right. Cut through and reach people. And then he went over here. And then he went over here and played rock and roll. And sort of, yeah, got rid of his savior label. And people thought he was making not only a bad career decision, but a bad artistic decision. The irony is now, like a Rolling Stone or Subterranean Homesick Blues, they're kind of considered some of his best music. So that's generally what the movie's about. It's that period. And it's a good period too, because mid-60s, early mid-70s, Rolling Thunder review, 80s bop, a lot of it's chronicle. This is sort of the period, because he wasn't famous yet, that's the least sort of scene. But we also don't demystify it. The movie's called A Complete Unknown. So this isn't like, this isn't inventing tragedy to explain backstory. In fact, that was sort of the challenge of the movie. You're playing someone whose career rise was rapid, you know, which I can relate to too. Because I struggled and I worked very hard, but ultimately my career took off when I was 21. Yeah, I want to talk about that actually, because the idea of like quote-unquote fame, right? When something happens to you very fast and it's a product of the good work that you do. Needless to say, if there's the chemistry of like your most authentic self meeting the best opportunity, meeting the most amount of people, that's good fame. With all my work, but especially the early work, it so wasn't working until it totally worked. And that's why I'm so proud. If you say Call Me By Your Name had a small budget, it was like a $3 million movie. And in the context of how people's careers launch, it's never that, I mean, rarely, rarely. That's why I'm happy to bring it all back home with this one or even do this interview here because this is the sweet spot as an actor is, you know, these sort of bigger budget. They're not like an indie, but it's a bigger budget thing. It's sort of like where I feel like Leo did a lot of his great work. It's not the huge movies that are really hard to sneak great performances in. I always talk about Heath Ledger as Joker and the Dark Knight. That's an example of a huge movie where someone snuck in a fantastic performance. His performance in that, by rights, could have been the box office death of that film. It was that strange and affecting and intense, but because he was who he was, he made it even bigger. Yeah, exactly. Without compromising anything. No compromise. And it feels to me like your experience is here and that nine month period we got to make those films and everything you went through, because let's not forget, you'd had a taste of what it was to be on a big scene. You did Interstellar. For me, Interstellar, and I was signed to William Morris Agency, that was Bob having a deal at Columbia and his album flopping. It's not like nothing flopped, but it remains my favorite movie I've ever been in. That's at the top of my list. That's the one I go back to and watch. But I thought it was gonna do something for my career the way it didn't. I just thought my part was bigger. Basically, there's a scene where McConaughey, some of the best acting of the decade, where he's weeping in the ship. I'm the other half of that scene, so I thought it would cut sort of back and forth, you know what I mean? Even though- It doesn't stay on him. It's on him. I didn't know that. Yeah, so I'm sort of watching it just like, where am I? And then it cuts to Casey who's playing the older. I was like, oh, now I'm out the movie. Yeah, but there's a great moment when you say goodbye to him. Yeah, that's great. There's also a shot in one of the trailers where I'm saying goodbye to him that wasn't in the movie. So also when I watched the movie, they used this like push-in shot. So I was getting ready for this, you know? Well, this leaves an interesting place in your role in this and in a complete unknown because you're also a producer on this film. Yes. So what happens with success is you get to a point where you're able to have a little bit more of an invested interest in the end result. When you're an actor and you're starting out, it's pure trust in the director, pure trust in the studio. Now you get to produce this film. It puts you in a more invested role, which ultimately people want you to be. But there's going to be moments when your instinct goes above and beyond protocol even, where an actor and a director, an actor in a studio, an actor and a producer, you talked about some of the areas where you already kind of had to put your foot down and say, no, I want to do it like this. Yes. So what's that line like to walk? As you take on more responsibility for the projects you say yes to, what's it like building a new form of trust with the people who- That's a great question. You can't meddle. A director has to have their singular vision. I've been spoiled where I've worked almost exclusively with auteurs in some way. Producerially, I see people that are really all over it. That's where I earn that justification is the music I snuck into the movie. So I feel like that's where I earn my credit there. Being an actor is about being a humanist at its core. That's my theory. You have a couple actors that are alienists. You're watching them for their worldview and you don't really relate to it, but you go, oh, that's kind of fascinating. Most actors, you are relating through. I would put myself more in that humanist category, but I found in my early career when Calling By Your Name and all this stuff was taken off and I was treated like a pop star or something, you can drink the Kool-Aid for a better expression. And when I was doing my play here, my dream was to, on Showtime or HBO, book a miniseries or something that I could have a great role in. I had humbled myself to that point. I really was like, this is a drying up business. If I could just get a great role. But I found for my work, I'm like, wait, I'm jealous of the musicians and the pop stars. Your music can be about your eroding humanity or if you're a postmodernist or something, it could be about anything. But I'm like pounding my nail in the wall. So I actually have to retain that sense of humanity. That's a long-winded way of saying, so if I have a producer credit on a movie, that's really not to any director I work with. I was just pitching Alfonso Cuarón on a project. But if I produce something that he's directing, I'm not going to be, you know, because that would be foolish, you know, unless I direct something one day, but I wouldn't direct myself in something. Would you do that? I wouldn't, yeah, I would definitely direct something. And I also think I've had the weird worldview experience where I've worked with like 10 greats and I've seen how they've all, or like something like that, something crazy. And I've seen how they all work. So it's an insular job. Most directors only see how other directors work. Greta has because she's an actress in her own right. But I always think like when actors get to work with the greats, like at some point you're going to have to define your vision, right? There's great examples of musicians who played guitar for great bands and session players, like Jimmy Page, right? Jimmy Page was like a very successful session guitar player. Like very successful, could have made a great living out of that. But then he had to go find out what Led Zeppelin sounded like. Right, right. And so at some point it's going to be like, yeah, of course, like I know it makes James James and you can take all those things, but what's your identity as a director going to be? I have no clue. I know what I don't want it to be. I'm in this worldview where the film business, this is my inner Tom Cruise, no, I'm joking. But where the film business sort of isn't what it was. So I feel there's a responsibility to make things that works. That's not, that doesn't dare an audience to be bored basically, which is what a lot of prestige movies do, right? And so that's why I love this Bob Dylan movie because there's two versions of Bob Dylan movie, I think. One is a behavioral masterclass that honors someone who didn't really make a lot of eye contact. And then what's the movie about? Then it's like watching paint dry or something. And to the people that know he's a genius, they love it. And to people that don't know anything about him, they'd rather, you know, spend their time and money elsewhere. And then there's the other version that's disingenuous to who he actually was and is like a greatest hits thing. And he's smooth talking and making eye contact. And this is something else where it's still engaging, which is why our main goal was the best director. It doesn't dishonor the fact that this was a strange cat. So it's an ensemble cast and there's a lot of characters that played really pivotal roles in Bob's story. And I think what became very clear in the movies that followed the documentaries and the stories and interviews was that he was trying to get away from it being about him. And he was respectful of the fact that it was about Pete and about Joan and about Suze ultimately now played as Sylvie. So what was it like kind of working in character with that cast mentality and with the chemistry of those people around and having to sort of recapture that experience that he was going through with those really pivotal people in his life? Okay, I'll give you two answers. One is about preparation for Bob exclusively. One is about in relation to those characters. So what I did for Bob started during COVID. That was learning all the songs, learning maybe the Bob songs. I know how to play 20% of which are in the movie. So that was the first education. Then I was working with Tim Monick, who's the- Why you had to learn how many songs? For the movie, I had to learn 13, let's say, or something. But in total, I could probably play 30. So Tim Monick was a dialect coach. That's who I worked with for years on this. Worked with a harmonica coach for five years and then worked with a woman named Polly Bennett, who's a movement coach that actually we got more out of just working on the script together than anything physicality related. And then for my own spirit gathering, for lack of a better metaphor, I retraced Bob's step through Chicago, his steps through Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin. And I started in Hibbing in Duluth and I spent about a week where he's from in Minnesota. So let's get into that part of it because I could go there and I could go and visit a house that he lived in or- Right. I did visit the house he lived in because it's a mega fan named Bill. I'm forgetting his last name, but Bill owns the house. And there's a piece of paper where he wrote, it's not online. He wrote the lyrics to Song to Woody, which has the melody structure of 1913 Massacre. He wrote it on the record sleeve of 1913 Massacre with a drawing that says Bob in Chicago, a drawing of him from the back with a long winding road to New York City. And it says, bound for glory. And he drew, yeah, it's- What? Which is the name of the Woody Guthrie book. And then a drawing of New York City with Woody and NYC at the top. But I went there just to get a sense of, and also because it was sort of mysterious to me and still is mysterious. Hibbing and Duluth are like on the edge of the world, it felt like. I went at the peak of winter and I landed in Minneapolis. I rented a truck. I was racing down the highway and listening to Sun Records, is that what it was? Where that Johnny Cash and Elvis and all of them were on when they were young. And then I skidded on ice and because I didn't know the roads well enough, just get a sense of where he's from. Obviously, Minnesota in 2024 is not the 60s, but those are good, friendly people, that don't have the city pretensions that sometimes you have living in New York or LA. Did you get a sense of what he was trying to get away from? Yeah, I did. I absolutely did. I could sort of relate to it that my dad, my dad's sort of from the Minnesota of France. You know, he's from, he's not from Paris. He's from Ardèche's region, you know. So when I spent my summers in that region, I could relate to that. Where I was in a tiny town in France and it's not that I resented it, but I went, man, there's gotta be something out there. Because I feel it. Again, what's your reason to being? Sometimes your reason to being is just your reason of being. That you just got something to say. It matters sometimes less what you have to say, more your need to say it. You know, so just trying to get a sense of how he was. And like I said, drove through Madison and Chicago, which is supposed to be what his route was, to New York on his first journey there. Just you? Just me. It had to be just me. And then, you know, because you gotta, that's the challenge of, as opposed to like, when I was shooting Beautiful Boy, you gotta create those moments of insularity as an actor. It's, and it can become more challenging. And you want to offshoot responsibilities, you know. But the whole point, why, you know, I didn't get into this to, that's the whole thing with all the coaches and stuff. I had to do it because, because I knew my contemporaries that had done biopics had done it. And at some point I was like, this isn't, this isn't helping me. And it's also not fun. It's not, it's not as rewarding. But see, exactly. You get to check into Chicago and you have one job, which is to try to better understand the environment. Even when I was landing in Minneapolis and I had tears in my eyes, because I thought, this is so strange. I thought, here's a guy, you know, if you told me, Bob came, has come to mean to me what Cuddy meant to me. So visiting where Cuddy lived on New Lots Avenue in New York when I dropped out of college for interstellar and I couldn't get a job. And I'm at New Lots Avenue on the last stop of the train just to see where he was. Made sense. If you told me I was going to have that journey through my early twenties, mid twenties with another artist that I would then be tasked with actually embodying. And I didn't know who that artist was yet. I would have, I would have been stunned, you know. So a lot of it was just, you know, and listening to this music from the city, but he would have been listening to Johnny Cash or Elvis or Little Richard or Buddy Holly. And a lot of it listening to his music and going and just feeling like a humble historian or something. And just kind of walking that path. Did you feel different when you started than when you arrived back in New York? Absolutely. It made some insecurity had been solved. Some, some curiosity and also knowing people, knowing the, the lawyer who helped them change his name, you know, and getting anecdotes. I'm not going to share here, but stuff that was tremendously insightful, stuff that hasn't made its way online. That shouldn't make its way online, but stuff that was, there were little clues. That drawing I just described to you, seeing his basement, seeing how he grew up, seeing how confined his room was, seeing how it wasn't torturous. It was a house on a street. Not a bad, not a bad street. It's amazing that this film is even being made really, because if you think about how the lengths he went in order to stop people from understanding what you went and ultimately experienced, the lengths to which he just, like the answers he would give to interview questions that were just so obscure and obtuse in order to just say, look, you know, he was the best in the world at batting them away. Because he's understood somewhere in a pure artistic sense. A lot of us don't. It's about what he made. It's not about anything else. That is the least 2024 mentality of all time. In some respects, are you, and I guess maybe you can speak for James Mangold, the director, are you surprised that he is involved in this film at all? No, because I don't think word is gospel to him in this. In other words, I think his experience of the world was so strange to be deified like that. I think this is another, my guess, is it's another raindrop in the bucket of a strange life of people trying to interpret you or your words or your songs. So the idea of deification, right? The idea of having so much talent or having such a gift of being open to some energy, some muse, some magic, which is what I think music and art ultimately stems from is magic. You know, I've spent a lot of time talking to artists who just tap in and they don't know where they come from. How does a person just like anybody else process how the world is seeing them through their talent? Absolutely. And when people want a piece of that, it's the most conventional cliche, but also when it's really good and people want a slice of it, and how do you protect whatever it is that makes it good? That's sort of the structure of the movie too, is he leaves Minnesota to get away from, I don't want to say what's strangling him, but it feels like it's holding him back. Goes to New York, finds a family, the folk community, that then does the exact same thing and tries to strangle him. And then he has to break free of that. And then does that the rest of his life, in dedication to his art, no matter what consequence it was to his personal life. Not that I know of any, but we don't really know. Maybe there's like 20 films that could be made about his life, really. This is going to be such an interesting one. Has better understanding what he went through, at least through the character that you're playing, the interpretation of it, has it changed you and how you're able to sort of live your life and does it happen often when you come out of roles, in particular, when it's a real life role? Yes. Here, I felt like I went through a thing. Like Bob says at the end of Don't Look Back, I feel like I went through a thing. And on the other side of it is the bravery to don't look back. Our culture now, not only do we look back, we contextualize the back immediately. What happens if you see somebody take a picture and spend 10 minutes editing and putting it back, that's them contextualizing what happened. Unless you're the rare kind of person that takes a picture and posts, right? No one. So here, I felt like I had the bravery of the other side of it to... I often ask myself, like, what would Bob do? That sounds so basic, but it's just the truth. How the **** would we know? Yeah, no, but I mean it in the sense that I'm ignoring what he would do by even being here because he would be on another planet. But just in my own day to day, just leading with your artistic foot first, not in a pretentious sense, but just doing the stuff that really challenges you. Who was I? It was an actor's interview I was reading the other day. Was it a Joaquin Phoenix interview? Something where you just gotta... Yeah, it was a Joaquin interview, but you just gotta always push yourself out of your comfort zone and not be complacent. And man, I can't say. His songs are like the songs of life and you can't describe them. If I got anything out of it, it was just the feeling of it. In a moment, I needed it. And it was like a new guiding light to how I want to feel when I work. I'd love to do more things like this, that's for sure.