Timothée Chalamet spent five years preparing to play Bob Dylan: 'It was a gift'

Timothée Chalamet recently gave an explanation of how he was able to impersonate the late great Bob Dylan with such ease.

A Complete Unknown, which has already been dubbed the major biopic, centres on the life of the rock and folk icon.

In an interview with OK! Magazine, Chalamet, who is well-known for his roles in films like Dune and Wonka, said he chose to focus on playing Dylan, who is regarded as one of the best songwriters of all time.

He talked about how he spent five years getting ready for the part by performing live guitar and singing, but it came easily to him because he was a huge fan of Bob Dylan.

“And that’s not unique to me,” he said at the international press conference on Zoom from New York.

Chalamet continued, “That’s why there are millions of Bob Dylan fans all over the globe — because this music, while relatable, which has had a mass success over the last decades, is also really deeply poetic and emotional and grand.”

“It’s a fabulous thing for a young artist like myself to dive into over the course of my twenties. He’s just the greatest artist and musician to learn from,” he further mentioned.

The 29-year-old believed his interest in Dylan and his life as an “obsession” and told the outlet, “That was simply the gift of how much time I had to work on this project and, I guess, not work on it; just to be in it and to live in it.”

“The whole process was more than five years. It was before Covid, during Covid and afterwards. If you prepare for a role over the span of two or three months, then I would say it qualifies as research. With this, I had so much time, so I could really breathe the experience,” he detailed.

The actor also got help from home to fuel his passion, as he also revealed, “A friend of my father’s growing up was a Dylan-head.”

“He was Dylan obsessed. I don’t even think I heard any of his music. I just knew this one friend of my father’s, called Larry, was really infatuated with Bob Dylan and his lyricism — and he had a huge black and white portrait of him in his apartment. That was very striking,” he concluded.