Oscar Isaac initially wasn’t sold on the idea of Timothee Chalamet playing Bob Dylan!
If you didn’t know, Timothee, 28, will be playing a younger version of the 83-year-old folk music icon in the upcoming movie A Complete Unknown directed by James Mangold.
While presenting Timothee and James with the Visionary Tribute Award at the 2024 Gotham Awards, Oscar, 45, admitted that he thought that Timothee playing Bob Dylan was a “really bad idea.”
Keep reading to find out more…Oscar recalled working with Timothee on the 2021 movie Dune: Part One when Timothee first told him and costars Josh Brolin and Stephen McKinley Henderson about the Bob Dylan biopic.
“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,” Oscar said. “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,’” Oscar continued. “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–t.”
Even though Oscar estimated that Timothee “had just started learning the guitar” and how to sing at that time, he believed that the Wonka actor approached Bob 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,” Oscar shared. “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.’”
He concluded, “James and Timothee 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.”
Timothee is already garnering a lot of Oscars buzz for his role, and if he wins, he could make history.
A Complete Unknown hits theaters on December 25. Watch the trailer here!
