Wonka star Timothée Chalamet has told of the incredible lengths he went to in order to portray Bob Dylan in an eagerly anticipated movie about the song legend's life - starting with a crash course on who he was playing.
Chalamet, 28, who has become one of Hollywood's hottest properties, didn't think twice about taking the role in A Complete Unknown. He spent five years learning how to play harmonica and guitar, and mimicked Dylan on all the songs in the film so perfectly that his co-stars thought he was miming.
But the actor who is the cover star in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine admitted he had a lot of studying to do at first.
Chalamet said: "I had to learn how famous he was in the 60s and 70s."
For the film, the Dune actor is transformed into a dead ringer for a young Dylan.
As a fan of hip-hop, Chalamet knew very little about the songwriter before taking on the role. But he said he very quickly became a "devoted disciple in the church of Bob".
Chalamet, who is dating the youngest of the Kardashian sisters, Kylie Jenner, said: "When I got approached with this project six years ago, 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.
"I'm happy I took five or six years because I'm now in that Church of Bob. I'm a humble disciple and I feel I've got this opportunity to kind of be a bridge to this music."
And he added: "This was taking on someone who maybe to my generation isn't impersonated to death but to the previous generation is the most.
"I thought, I need to worry less about how Bob Dylan would eat a bagel and capture the spirit of this guy."
To do so, Chalamet worked with a vocal coach, a guitar teacher, a dialect coach, a movement coach, even a harmonica teacher.
During research for the role, he hired a pick-up truck and drove to Minnesota in a blizzard to meet 82-year-old Bill Pagel, a retired pharmacist and avid Dylan collector who bought the singer-songwriter's former home in 2019.
Dylan - born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth in 1943 - lived at the house between the ages of six and 18.
The film charts the early part of Dylan's career. The film's director and co-screenwriter, James Mangold, previously gave a Hollywood gloss to Johnny Cash's story in Walk the Line.
He also became Steven Spielberg 's handpicked successor, directing last year's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
The film sees Dylan making a name for himself as a troubadour in New York's Greenwich Village folk scene.
In one sequence, set in 1961, Dylan visits This Land is Your Land singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie at the New Jersey hospital where he was being treated for Huntington's disease, and sings for his hero.
He is also shown being mentored by Guthrie's folk singer pal Pete Seeger, played in the film by Edward Norton, while his early lovers Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez are played by Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro.
Chalamet, who agreed to be the cover star of the latest edition of Rolling Stone magazine to promote the film, admitted he had bitten off a lot by attempting to impress even diehard Dylan fans with his portrayal of the man who gave us such classic songs as Blowing in the Wind and The Times They are A-Changin'.
He said: "People are deeply protective of Bob Dylan and his music legacy because it's so pure in a sense, and they don't want to see a biopic mishandle that. This is the kind of pressure I want in my life. This is the kind of pressure I love."
Co-star Fanning said she got "chills" watching him perform "a whole concert" as Dylan.
She said: "He was singing Masters of War and A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall, and I was like, 'Jesus'.
"All of us were kind of shaking, because it was so surreal hearing someone do that, so perfectly done, but it wasn't a caricature. It was still Timmy, but it's Bob, and this kind of beautiful meld. That gave me chills."
Afterwards, she heard some of the extras debating whether Chalamet was lip-synching.
She said: "I tapped them on the shoulder and I was like, 'He is singing. I know he's singing.'"
A Complete Unknown will be released in the US on Christmas Day but not until January 17 in the UK.
Chalamet said: "My good friend Austin Butler crushed it on Elvis, but Bob Dylan didn't have a vocal coach. He had two bottles of red wine and four packs of cigarettes so there's no way to impersonate that."The journey I've been on as an actor, this is like bringing it all back home, no pun intended."
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