Timothée Chalamet enlisted some key people help him become Bob Dylan. While preparing to play Dylan in A Complete Unknown, Chalamet had a dialect coach, a movement coach, and a vocal coach.
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“My way in was with the music,” Chalamet said in a digital featurette obtained by Entertainment Weekly. “That’s like my confident spot in the movie.”
Director James Mangold certainly agreed. In fact, he said that getting Chalamet to “work playing guitar and singing, just on the level of getting his skills up” was “the most important” part of the actor’s job.
“How can you possibly make a movie about someone who just sings kind of naked alone with a guitar, only every time they do, it’s some kind of unearthly voice coming through their body falsely? It seems to rub in direct contradiction,” Mangold noted. “So that was the very first thing I just exhorted Timmy to do.”
Timothée Chalamet Is Praised By His Vocal and Guitar Coaches
With that in mind, Chalament tapped vocal coach Eric Vetro. The seasoned professional’s most recent project was getting Ariana Grande ready to sing Glinda’s parts in Wicked.
While working with Chalamet, Vetro focused on discovering how the actor could convincingly play Dylan over the different decades in which the movie takes place.
“It’s at a certain time period, a certain year. So, we would try to capture what he was doing at that time. How did he sound. Why did he sound that way? And who had influenced him?” Vetro said. “You go, ‘OK, he was influenced by this particular person,’ so then Timmy would listen to that person sing as well.”
Chalamet also had the help of guitar coach Larry Saltzman.
“I arranged the songs in a hierarchy of this is an easier one; this is really hard and everything in the middle,” Saltzman said. “And I would explain to him, ‘Don’t get nervous if this takes you a minute, this is difficult,’ but somehow within like 90 seconds, the guy was [playing].”
“I could be showing somebody that for six months, and they could never get it,” he continued. “He’d get the guitar and the harmonica and play ‘Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’ or something, and I’m just sitting there watching this guy thinking, ‘Do you believe what this guy just did?’”
Timothée Chalamet Has Earned Praise for His Portrayal of Bob Dylan
Chalamet’s work paid off. His portrayal of Dylan has already earned him awards recognition. In fact, he won the Best Actor trophy at the 2025 Screen Actors Guild Awards on Feb. 23. During his acceptance speech, Chalamet spoke about how much work went into the role.
“I know the classiest thing would be to downplay the effort that went into this role and how much this means to me, but the truth is this was five and a half years of my life,” he said. “I poured everything I had into playing this incomparable artist, Mr. Bob Dylan, a true American hero. It was the honor of a lifetime playing him.”
“I know we’re in a subjective business, but I’m really in pursuit of greatness. People don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats. I’m inspired by the greats here tonight,” Chalamet added. “I’m as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando, and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there. So I’m deeply grateful to that. This doesn’t signify that, but it’s a little more ammo, a little more fuel to keep going.”
Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
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