Oscar Isaac initially cast doubt on Timothée Chalamet stepping into Bob Dylan’s shoes for his biopic in A Complete Unknown.
The Star Wars star recalled the time his Dune co-star told him about the role he was preparing to play next.
“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,” he remembered while presenting the Visionary Tribute Award to director James Mangold and Timothée.
“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.”
The 45-year-old continued, “Then Timmy takes out his guitar — not a good sign — and starts playing ‘Girl from the North Country,’
“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 ****.”
Oscar noted though Timothée “had just started learning the guitar” and how to sing at that time, he felt the actor approached 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,” the Moon Knight star noted.
“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,'” Oscar concluded.
